Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx is an American author of fiction and essays celebrated for her unsentimental, darkly beautiful portrayals of rural life, landscape, and the marginal communities of the American West and Northeast. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1935, Proulx studied history at Colby College and the University of Vermont. She published her first novel Postcards at age fifty-eight, and her career accelerated rapidly thereafter. Proulx's major works include The Shipping News (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award; the short story 'Brokeback Mountain' (1997), later adapted by Ang Lee into the acclaimed 2005 film; and the Wyoming Stories series, collected in Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). Her novel Barkskins (2016) is an ambitious multigenerational saga about the destruction of North American forests. Proulx received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2017. Her prose is distinctive for its compression, its physical specificity, its dark irony, and its deep feeling for the land and the people who work it. She has lived in numerous places across the United States, including Wyoming and Vermont.