She frequently writes of children who feel and observe more acutely than their parents realize. Her autodidactic studies included an intense engagement with Ernest Hemingway's work, and she learned early and independently to appreciate both his darker insights and his austere code of authorial self-editing. He remains a lasting influence, as she wryly acknowledged when, after her accountant urged her to incorporate in the 1980s, she named her corporation "Irony and Pity, Inc.," drawing on a line from Jake Barnes, the protagonist of Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises (1926).
After earning a bachelor of arts degree at American University in 1969, Beattie began graduate work in English at the University of Connecticut. As Jaye Berman Montresor notes in the introduction to The Critical Response to Ann Beattie (1993), Beattie began writing stories during this period because she was "so goddamn bored" with graduate school. She received her master of arts degree in 1970, but she left the Ph.D. program in 1972 without completing her degree. Her first published story, "A Rose for Judy Garland's Casket," appeared in the Western Humanities Review before the year was out.
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