Marilynne Robinson

Born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, a small town on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho panhandle, the daughter of Ellen Harris and John J. Summers, a lumber company employee. She grew up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in the kind of spare, luminous American landscape that would pervade her fiction. She studied at Pembroke College, the women's college at Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1966 and earning election to Phi Beta Kappa, then received her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), about two sisters raised by their eccentric, transient aunt in a small lakeside town in Idaho, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and announced a literary voice of extraordinary patience and beauty, sentences that move with the cadence of hymns. Then, remarkably, she published no fiction for twenty-four years. During that silence, she wrote Mother Country (1989), a fierce polemic against nuclear waste dumping at the Sellafield plant in England, and The Death of Adam (1998), a collection of essays rehabilitating Calvin, Puritanism, and other subjects dismissed by modern intellectual fashion. Gilead (2004), an epistolary novel in the form of a dying Iowa minister's letter to his young son, broke the long silence and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Home (2008) and Lila (2014), companion novels exploring the same small town and interlocking families from different perspectives, extended what became one of the most remarkable fictional achievements of the twenty-first century. Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1991 to 2016 and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2012.