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Annie
Proulx
Edna
Annie Proulx was born on August twenty second, 1935 in the town of Norwich Connecticut. As a child her family moved frequently and by
the time she enrolled in Colby College in Waterville,
Maine she had lived in Connecticut,
Vermont, North Carolina,
Maine, and Rhode Island. In 1955 Proulx dropped out of school and
Married H. Ridgely Bullock, Jr. The marriage
produced a daughter, but they divorced in 1960 and Bullock raised the
child. Proulx married again several
years later and had 2 more children, Jonathan Edward and Gills Crowell,
although this marriage also ended. In
1963 Proulx moved back to Vermont
and returned to school. She graduated in
1969 with a B.A. in history from the Univerisity of Vermont in Burlington, and that same year Married
again. This marriage produced another
son, Morgan Hamilton, but once again this marriage ended in divorce. Proulx attended Graduate school at Sir George Williams University
in Montreal,
and earned her M.A. in 1973, and continued school doing doctoral work in
Renaissance economic history. Although
she passed her oral exam in 1975, Proulx did not complete her degree, deciding
that she wanted to pursue writing instead of teaching. Proulx had been writing short stores before
entering grad school, and Seventeen
magazine published several of her stories between 1964 and 1974. Over the next ten years Proulx wrote many
short stores and articles on various subjects for various magazines including Gourmet,
Horticulture, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Blair and Ketchums, Outdoor Life,
National Wildlife, Organic Gardening, and Country Journal. She also wrote two nonfiction books
co-authored by friend Lew Nichols, Sweet and Hard Cider: Making It, Using
It, and Enjoying It (1980) and The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook
(1982). From 1984 to 1986, Proulx wrote
also four more books on gardening, and won a Garden Writers of America Award in
1986. In 1982, Esquire magazine
published Proulx’s short story “The Wer-Trout”, which lead to a deal with
publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons and the publication of “Heart songs and Other
Stories” in 1988. Proulx’s first novel
“Postcards” was written in Clearmont,
Wyoming and published in 1992. The novel was well received, and in 1993
Proulx received the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Proulx’s next two books were also written in Wyoming, the first of
which, “The Shipping News”, was written with the assistance of a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. The novel was widely praised and a best
seller, and earned Proulx the National Book Award for Fiction, a Chicago
Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, and Irish Times International Fiction
Prize, and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1995, Proulx moved to Wyoming and
has since published four books: “Accordion Crimes” (1996), “Close Range:
Wyoming Stories” (1999), “That Old Ace in the Hole” (2002), and “Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2”. Proulx currently lives in Wyoming and spends a good deal of time
traveling. Her third installment of the
“Wyoming Stories” series, “Fine Just The Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3” is scheduled to be
released on September 9, 2008.
All biographical information is
taken from Karen Rood’s Understanding Annie Proulx.
Release dates of books after 1999
are according to Amazon.com
Rood,
Karen L. Understanding Annie Proulx.Columbia:University of South
Carolina Press,2001.
~ Matthew Base |
