The range and variety of Jane Smiley's work as a writer of fiction have resulted in a great deal of critical attention, a wide and committed readership, and several different perceptions of her achievement. Smiley's novels, particularly those following...
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley has also won acclaim for her work as an author of short fiction. In The Age of Grief: Stories and a Novella (1987), Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas (1989), The Life of the Body: A Story (1990),...
Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at...
When Jane Smiley sat down to write "Ten Days in the Hills," she found herself confronting a technical problem she'd never faced before: Too much sex. "Uh oh, now I'm really in for it," she thought. At 57, Smiley has been...
ORDINARY LOVE & GOOD WILL By Jane Smiley Knopf. 197 pp. $17.95 JANE SMILEY has written four novels, most recently the haunting 14th-century epic saga, The Greenlanders. But Smiley's reputation as one of the finest younger American fiction writers is based...
Chalk up yet another writerly reaction to the trauma of 9/11. Four years on, we’re almost able to chart on a graph how some writers regurgitated bits of the smoke they ingested as super-realistic horror, while others about-faced into fantasy. What Jane Smiley did, as...
Chalk up yet another writerly reaction to the trauma of 9/11. Four years on, we’re almost able to chart on a graph how some writers regurgitated bits of the smoke they ingested as super-realistic horror, while others about-faced into fantasy. What Jane Smiley did, as...
In the following essay, Bakerman draws comparisons between Smiley's Duplicate Keys and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, including the tension between the characters’ Midwestern values and city life in the East.
Oates is the author of several novels, including Man Crazy. In the following review, she asserts that while there are some well-written individual scenes in Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, the novel does not work as a whole.
