Annie Proulx | Signed First Editions

About Annie Proulx

Edna Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1935, the eldest of five daughters of a textile company executive and a painter mother who taught her to look closely at the world, at insects, at the feel of fabrics, at the particular angles of strangers’ faces. That attentiveness never left her. It became, eventually, the engine of her fiction.

Her route to novel-writing was long and roundabout. She married young, left college, returned to finish a history degree at the University of Vermont in 1969, began a doctorate at Concordia in Montreal and didn’t finish it, raised three sons largely alone, and spent the better part of the 1980s supporting herself through freelance journalism, writing about fishing, cider-making, and country living for magazines. She also produced a run of practical how-to books, which she found increasingly unsatisfying. What she really wanted to write was fiction, and she had been writing it, quietly, on the side.

Her short story collection Heart Songs appeared in 1988, and her first novel, Postcards, followed in 1992. That debut, a bleak and formally inventive account of a Vermont man who abandons his family after a terrible act and drifts across America for forty years, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making Proulx the first woman to receive the prize. Critics reached for large comparisons, Faulkner, Melville, Dreiser, and the literary world started paying very close attention indeed.

The following year came The Shipping News, a dark, comic, deeply strange novel set in Newfoundland, following an unlucky journalist named Quoyle who tries to rebuild his life on the windswept island after the death of his faithless wife. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and it remains her most widely read book. A film adaptation followed in 2001, directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Kevin Spacey, though it is the novel that endures. The Shipping News sits firmly within American literary fiction, and its place in that tradition seems secure.

In 1997, her short story Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys and the secret life they share over decades in Wyoming, appeared in The New Yorker. It won the O. Henry Prize. Ang Lee’s 2005 film adaptation won three Academy Awards, including Best Director, and brought Proulx’s name to an audience that extended well beyond literary fiction readers. The story appeared in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), one of three volumes of Wyoming fiction she would go on to produce, each one adding to the portrait of a landscape and a way of life that she rendered with a specificity no other writer has matched.

Her 2016 novel Barkskins is a different kind of ambition altogether: a multigenerational epic spanning three centuries and two family lines, tracing the deforestation of North America from New France in 1693 to the present day. It was adapted as a National Geographic limited series in 2020. The novel cemented her standing as a writer willing to take on the largest possible subjects without losing sight of individual lives.

The awards have accumulated accordingly. She holds the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, two O. Henry Prizes, the National Book Foundation’s Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

What makes Proulx unusual is not simply the quality of the prose, though it is remarkable, dense and rhythmic and full of the surprise of very specific language. It is the commitment to place and to research. She doesn’t imagine landscapes; she lives in them, studies them, earns the right to write about them. Wyoming, Newfoundland, the forests of colonial North America: each world she enters is rendered from the inside, with the authority of someone who has done the reading and walked the ground.

Now in her nineties and living in New Hampshire, she has published eleven books. Her reputation, already considerable, continues to grow.