Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Born July 18, 1969 (1969-07-18) (age 38)
Connecticut, Flag of the United States USA
Occupation Novelist, Memoirist
Nationality American
Writing period 1997 - present
Genres Fiction, Memoir
Official website

Elizabeth Gilbert (born July 18,1969) is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer, biographer and memoirist.


Contents

[edit] Background

Along with her only sister, novelist and historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Connecticut. 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, and 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).

[edit] Journalism

Esquire published Gilbert's short story “Pilgrims” in 1993, under the headline, “The Debut of an American Writer”. She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines including, SPIN, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.

Her 1997 GQ article, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon", a memoir of Gilbert’s career as a bartender in a lowdown East Village dive, was the basis for the film Coyote Ugly. She adapted her 1998 GQ article, "Eustace Conway is Not Like Any Man You've Ever Met," into a biography of the modern naturalist, The Last American Man. It received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction. "The Ghost," a profile of Hank Williams III published by GQ in 2000, was included in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.

[edit] Books

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".

Most recently, she published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking, 2006), a chronicle of the author's year of personal exploration. The memoir was on the New York Times best seller list of non-fiction in the spring of 2006, and has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Julia Roberts slated to star.[1]

In Eat Pray Love, she does not overtly name her Guru, but her Guru is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, head of the Siddha Yoga Meditation Lineage.[2]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Story collections

[edit] Novels

  • Stern Men, (2000)

[edit] Biographies

  • The Last American Man, (2002) (finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critic's Circle Award)

[edit] Memoirs

  • Eat, Pray, Love, (2006)

[edit] As contributor

  • The KGB Bar Reader: Buckle Bunnies (1998)
  • Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (contributor) (1999)
  • A Writer's Workbook: Daily Exercises for the Writing Life (foreword) (2000)
  • The Best American Magazine Writing 2001: The Ghost (2001)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fleming, Michael. "Par setting table for adaptation", Variety.com, 2006-10-10. Retrieved on 2007-06-15. 
  2. ^ The Info-News Blog for Fans of "Eat Pray Love": Meet Elizabeth Gilbert's Guru

[edit] External links

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