Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley, born September 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, California, is an American novelist whose work has ranged across fiction, nonfiction, short stories, young adult novels, and children’s books. She grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Community School and John Burroughs School. Her path as a writer was closely tied to study and teaching: she earned an AB in literature from Vassar College in 1971, then an MA in 1975, an MFA in 1976, and a PhD in 1978 from the University of Iowa.

While working toward her doctorate, Smiley spent a year in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar, an experience that sits alongside her long connection to Iowa as part of the background of her literary life. From 1981 to 1996, she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative-writing workshops. In 1996 she moved to California, and in 2015 she returned to teaching creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980. In 1985, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story “Lily,” published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-known book is A Thousand Acres, published in 1991, a story based on William Shakespeare’s King Lear. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 and was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. Another work, the novella The Age of Grief, became the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Her range has been broad. Her novels include At Paradise Gate, Duplicate Keys, The Greenlanders, Moo, Horse Heaven, Good Faith, Private Life, and later books such as Perestroika in Paris, A Dangerous Business, and Lucky. She also wrote a trilogy about an Iowa family over generations: Some Luck, published in 2014, followed by Early Warning in spring 2015 and Golden Age in fall 2015. Jonathan Franzen has called The Greenlanders greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.

Smiley’s nonfiction shows the same wide reading and curiosity. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, published in 2005, considers the history and nature of the novel, moving from eleventh-century Japan’s Murasaki Shikibu and The Tale of Genji to twenty-first-century American women’s literature. Other nonfiction books include Charles Dickens, A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck, and The Man Who Invented the Computer. She has also written essays included in Mommy Wars and Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.

In 2001, Smiley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, the same year she received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, and in 2009 she chaired the judges’ panel for the Man Booker International Prize. Across decades, her work has joined disciplined craft with a broad sense of literary history, family life, moral pressure, and the many forms a novel can take. That is why readers continue to return to her sentences for intelligence, clarity, and the steady pleasure of a writer who has kept widening her range.