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), and numerous uncollected short stories, Smiley writes about the complex, often secret, emotional dynamics that underlie ordinary human relationships. Often passive and usually sympathetic, Smiley's characters salvage self-knowledge out of the intricate histories and traumas of their inner lives. Smiley is adept at exploring the subtle exchanges of intimacy that commonly lead her characters to a condition of understanding. At the heart of Smiley's fiction is her belief that there are answers-sometimes bitter, even grievous-to the questions that afflict human beings.

Jane Graves Smiley was born on 26 September 1949 to James La Verne Smiley and Frances (née Graves) Smiley, a writer, in Los Angeles. By...