Annie Proulx

Edna Ann Proulx, born August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut, is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most often as Annie Proulx, while also using the names E. Annie Proulx and E. A. Proulx. Her parents were Lois Nellie Gill and Georges-Napoléon Proulx, and her background is English and French-Canadian. Her maternal forebears came to America in 1635, 15 years after the Mayflower arrived.

Proulx’s early life was marked by movement. As her father worked his way up through the textile industry, the family lived in multiple states along the East Coast. She wrote her first story at age 10 while sick with chicken pox, an early sign of the writer she would become. She graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine, briefly attended Colby College, and left after marrying H. Ridgely Bullock Jr. in 1955. Later she returned to school, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969 and graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in history. She earned an M.A. in history from Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in Montreal in 1973, pursued a PhD there, passed her oral examinations in 1975, and then left the dissertation unfinished.

Before her major fiction prizes, Proulx worked as a journalist and published across several forms. Her first published fiction was “The Customs Lounge,” a science fiction story that appeared in the September 1963 issue of If under the byline E. A. Proulx. In June 1964, her story “All the Pretty Little Horses” appeared in Seventeen. She later published stories in Esquire and Gray’s Sporting Journal in the late 1970s, along with how-to manuals for cooking and gardening. That range, from practical nonfiction to short fiction, helped shape a career grounded in work, place, and close observation.

Her first short-story collection, Heart Songs, appeared in 1988. Her first novel, Postcards, was published in 1992 and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making Proulx the first woman to receive that prize. The same year, she received both an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her second novel, The Shipping News, published in 1993, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Although set in Newfoundland and written by someone “from away,” the novel is noted for the vicarious quality of her writing.

Proulx is also widely associated with “Brokeback Mountain,” first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. The story won the O. Henry Prize in 1998 and was later adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005. She won the O. Henry Prize again the next year for “The Mud Below.” Both stories appear in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, her 1999 collection. In 2007, composer Charles Wuorinen approached her about turning “Brokeback Mountain” into an opera; the work, with a libretto by Proulx herself, premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014.

Proulx lived for more than 30 years in Vermont, later moved in 1994 to Bird Cloud, a ranch in Saratoga, Wyoming, and spent part of each year in northern Newfoundland near L’Anse aux Meadows. In 2011 she published Bird Cloud: A Memoir, largely based on that former Wyoming ranch. As of 2019, she lived in Port Townsend, Washington. Her work continues to matter because it has moved with unusual ease from magazine pages to prize lists, from novels to film, and from a short story to an opera, while keeping its roots in carefully chosen places and exacting prose.