Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert (born 1969) is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer, and memoirist.

Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Connecticut. Along with her sister, novelist and historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family tree farm. She attended New York University and graduated in 1991 with a BA in Political Science, after which she lived the life of a literary vagabond — experiencing life as a cook, a waitress, a magazine lackey — in order to write about it. Her experiences as a cook on a dude ranch found their way into both short stories and her book The Last American Man (Viking 2002).

Gilbert was first published in 1993, when Esquire published her short story “Pilgrims”. The story ran under the headline, “The Debut of an American Writer”. She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer.

Gilbert has published in a wide range of formats.

Her first book Pilgrims (Houghton-Mifflin 1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

This was followed by her novel Stern Men (Houghton-Mifflin 2000), selected by The New York Times as a "Notable Book".

Her biography The Last American Man (Viking 2002) about Eustace Conway, a modern-day woodsman, received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction.

Most recently, she published a memoir of a year of personal exploration entitled Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking, 2006). It was on the New York Times best seller list of non-fiction in the spring of 2006.

Gilbert has also worked steadily as a journalist for a variety of magazines including, SPIN, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure. One GQ story, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon", a memoir about Gilbert’s career as a bartender in a lowdown East Village dive, was the basis for the Disney movie Coyote Ugly.