Mary Robison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary Robison (b. January 14, 1949) is an American short-story writer and novelist. She has published four collections of stories, and three novels, including her 2001 novel Why Did I Ever, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. She has been categorized as a founding "minimalist" writer along with authors such as Amy Hempel and Raymond Carver.

Robison was born in Washington, D.C. to a patent attorney and a child psychologist. She has seven brothers and sisters as well as a half brother. From an early age she was interested in writing and as a child kept journals and wrote poetry as a teen ager. She once ran away from home and journeyed to Florida in search of Jack Kerouac.

In 1977 The New Yorker began publishing her work with the short story "Sisters." They have since published two dozen Robison stories, many of which reappear in American athologies. During the 1980s she published the novel "Oh" and the short-story collections An Amateur's Guide to the Night (1983) and Believe Them (1988).

In the 1990s she suffered from severe writer's block and in an effort to overcome it she scribbled her thoughts on thousands of index cards. These cards were reworked to become the novel Why Did I Ever, which consists of 536 short chapters.

Robison received her MA from The Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with John Barth. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities, and is now a tenured professor at the University of Florida. She is currently writing a new novel, 1 DOA, 1 on the Way.