Books by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in St Louis, Missouri. She was educated at Vassar College, receiving her B.A. degree in 1971, and at the University of Iowa, from which she received her M.A. degree in 1975, her M.F.A. degree in 1976, and her PhD in 1978. In 1981 Smiley began teaching at Iowa State University.Smiley's first novel, Barn Blind (1980), tells the story of a severe mother who alienates her husband and children after one of her sons dies in a horseback riding accident. A later novel, The Greenlanders (1988), about a curse that afflicts several generations of a 14th-century Scandinavian family, reflects Smiley's training as a scholar of medieval literature. Two collections of her shorter fiction also have been published: The Age of Grief (1987) and Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989). In 1992 she won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres (1991), for which she also won the National Book Critics