As an undergraduate English major at American University in the late 1960s she began, in her own words, to "take writing seriously" and to study the writers who eventually influenced her work: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Updike. In 1971 Beattie earned a master's degree from the University of Connecticut and began work on a doctorate in English. By 1972, however, the stories that she had been secretly working on had come to occupy her full attention, and she dropped out of graduate school to pursue a life in writing. Except for brief stints at the University of Virginia (1975-1977) and Harvard (1977-1978), Beattie has since shunned universities and writers' workshops. A lingering distaste for academic life is evident throughout her fiction.
In the early 1970s, under the tutelage of writer J. D. O'Hara, whom she credited in a 1982 interview with having "taken scissors to the ends of" her early stories, Beattie began publishing in magazines and literary journals, including Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Western Humanities Review. In 1974, after more than twenty rejections, The New Yorker accepted "A Platonic Relationship." From then until the mid 1990s, when the editorship of the magazine changed, Beattie published seven or eight stories a year in The New Yorker, and her fiction quickly gained a following among literate, upper-middle-class readers.
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