Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx at the Frankfurt Book Fair, May 2009
Born Edna Annie Proulx
August 22, 1935
Norwich, Connecticut, United States
Occupation Novelist
Alma mater University of Vermont
Notable awards Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1994 The Shipping News

Edna Annie Proulx (/ˈpruː/; born August 22, 1935) is an American journalist and author. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.[1]

Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[2] and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[3] and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

Life

Proulx (born Edna Ann Proulx, her first name honoring one of her mother's aunts), was born in Norwich, Connecticut to parents of English and French-Canadian ancestry.[4][5] Her maternal forebears came to America fifteen years after the Mayflower, in 1635.[6] She graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine, then attended Colby College "for a short period in the 1950s", where she met her first husband H. Ridgely Bullock, Jr. She later returned to college, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. degree in History in 1969. She earned her M.A. degree from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Quebec in 1973 and pursued, but did not complete, a Ph.D..

Proulx lived for more than thirty years in Vermont, has married and divorced three times, and has three sons and a daughter (named Jonathan, Gillis, Morgan, and Sylvia). In 1994, she moved to Saratoga, Wyoming, spending part of the year in northern Newfoundland on a small cove adjacent to L'Anse aux Meadows. Proulx now lives in Seattle, Washington.[7]

Proulx has four sisters: twins Joyce and Janet, who live in Louisiana and Florida respectively; Roberta, of Fairlee, Vermont; and Jude, another writer who lives in Wales.

Writing career and recognition

Starting as a journalist, her first published work of fiction is thought to be "The Customs Lounge", a science fiction story published in the September 1963 issue of If, under the byline "E.A. Proulx".[8] Another contender, probably earlier, was a science fiction story called "All the Pretty Little Horses", which appeared in teen magazine Seventeen possibly a year or two before this. She subsequently published stories in Esquire magazine and Gray's Sporting Journal in the late 1970s, eventually publishing her first collection in 1988 and her first novel in 1992. Subsequently, she was awarded NEA (in 1992) and Guggenheim (in 1993) fellowships.

A few years after receiving much attention for The Shipping News, she had the following comment on her celebrity status:

It's not good for one's view of human nature, that's for sure. You begin to see, when invitations are coming from festivals and colleges to come read (for an hour for a hefty sum of money), that the institutions are head-hunting for trophy writers. Most don't particularly care about your writing or what you're trying to say. You're there as a human object, one that has won a prize. It gives you a very odd, ginger kind of sensation.[9]

In 1997, Annie Proulx was awarded the Dos Passos Prize. Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year's best short story. In 1998, she won for "Brokeback Mountain", which had appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. Proulx won again the following year for "The Mud Below," which appeared in The New Yorker June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The lead story in this collection, entitled "The Half-Skinned Steer", was selected by author Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1998, (Proulx herself edited the 1997 edition of this series) and later by novelist John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). In 2001 Proulx was one of the writers heavily criticized by Brian Reynolds Myers in his polemical work A Reader's Manifesto.[10][11]

In 2007, the composer Charles Wuorinen approached Proulx with the idea of turning her short story "Brokeback Mountain" into an opera. The opera of the same name with a libretto by Proulx herself premiered January 28, 2014 at the Teatro Real in Madrid to mixed reviews.[12][13][14][15]

Bibliography

Nonfiction
Novels and short story collections

Awards

Film adaptations

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Library of Congress Name Authorities: Proulx, Annie". Retrieved February 4, 2013.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Fiction". Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-28.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "National Book Awards – 1993". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-28.
    (With acceptance speech by Proulx and essays by Bob Shacochis and Mark Sarvas from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  4. ↑ Hennessy, D. M. (2007). Annie Proulx. In R. E. Lee & P. Meanor (Eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol. 335. American Short-Story Writers Since World War II. Detroit: Gale.
  5. ↑ Annie Proulx. (2013). In J. W. Hunter (Ed.), Contemporary Literary Criticism (Vol. 331). Detroit: Gale.
  6. ↑ Jukka Petäjä, Maisema on ihmisen kehys ja varjo, Helsingin Sanomat, October 26, 2011, p. C4. (Finnish)
  7. ↑ WOOLFE, ZACHARY (26 January 2014). "Love That Dare Not Sing Its Name". New York Times. Retrieved 20 February 2014.
  8. ↑ "The Customs Lounge in If, Volume 13 No 4, September 1963 – E. Annie Proulx". Retrieved 2007-03-18.
  9. ↑ "Facts & Fiction – 97.11.12". (subscription only) The Atlantic Monthly. November 12, 1997.
  10. ↑ Myers, B. R. (July–August 2001). "A Reader's Manifesto". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
  11. ↑ Campbell, Duncan (August 16, 2001). "Critic savages 'pretentious' US literati". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
  12. ↑ William Jeffery, "Brokeback Mountain Opera Receives World Premiere", Limelight Magazine (30 January 2014).
  13. ↑ Westphal, Matthew (27 September 2007). "'Gay 12-Tone Cowboys' - Composer Charles Wuorinen Plans Opera Version of Brokeback Mountain". Playbill. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  14. ↑ "Opera: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, Teatro Real;". Teatro-Real.com. 2013-10-02. Retrieved 2013-10-02.
  15. ↑ Anthony Tommasini (29 January 2014). "Operatic Cowboys in Love, Onstage". New York Times. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
  16. ↑ "Heart songs / E. Annie Proulx". Catalogue. National Library of Australia.
  17. ↑ United States Artists Official Website

Further reading

External links