Curtis Sittenfeld

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Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (born 1975) is an American writer who has published two novels, Prep, a tale about a New England prep school, and The Man of My Dreams, another coming-of-age novel, as well as other short stories.

Elizabeth was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Paul G., an investment adviser, and Elizabeth (Curtis) Sittenfeld, an art history teacher at the Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati.

She attended the Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.

She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year.

After receiving her B.A., she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she wrote for The Charlotte Observer. Soon, she moved to Boston to work for Fast Company magazine, for which she'd continue to write even after she moved to the Midwest to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. In 1998, she won The Mississippi Review 's fiction contest. She was the Writer in Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. during the 2002 - 2003 academic year and taught ninth grade English there from 2003 - 2005.

Curtis Sittenfeld told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2005 that it is unlikely she will return to her hometown. "I see myself in a bigger city or a college town, a place smaller than Cincinnati. I loved living in Iowa City," she said, despite the absence of Graeter's ice cream, a Queen City staple. In The New York Times Book Review she lamented that she was not likely to have literary groupies, as the photo on her dust jacket "suggests less 'Let's have a drink after the reading' and more 'Ninth graders, your Macbeth papers are due on Friday."

Her articles have appeared in Teen People, People Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and Real Simple. She has also reported for the public radio program This American Life.

Contents

[edit] Novels

[edit] Prep

The jacket of her novel Prep.
The jacket of her novel Prep.

Her first novel, which took her three years to write, concerns a girl from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to an elite boarding school near Boston, Massachusetts (a thinly-veiled Groton School.) The plot deals with coming of age and class distinctions in the preppy and competitive atmosphere of the school.

Reviews of "Prep" were mixed, with views ranging from highly laudatory to those who said that it was a well-written but weakly-plotted story that was bouyed by strong detail and narration. Some saluted the book for its verisimilitude, including Elissa Schappell, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that "Sittenfeld's dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn't wear a wire under her hockey kilt." The New York Times named Prep one of their top five works of fiction for 2005.

Less positively, a review in Publisher's Weekly stated, "The book meanders on its way, light on plot but saturated with heartbreaking humor and written in clean prose. Sittenfeld . . . proves herself a natural in this poignant, truthful book." Critics have also suggested that "no matter what she says, Curtis Sittenfeld cannot convince certain readers that her debut novel, Prep, was really a work of fiction."

The book has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, which also has an unrelated project with the same name, under its MTV Films umbrella.

[edit] The Man of My Dreams

The jacket of The Man of My Dreams.
The jacket of The Man of My Dreams.

Sittenfeld's second novel, called The Man of My Dreams, was published in May 2006 by Random House. It follows a girl named Hannah from the end of her 8th grade year through her college years at Tufts and into her late twenties. Both in comparison to Prep and other novels, The Man of My Dreams has gathered very mixed reviews with much of the same praise and criticism Prep has garnered.

[edit] References

[edit] Articles about Sittenfeld

[edit] Reviews of Sittenfeld's books

[edit] External links

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