Bom in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, Barbara Kingsolver later settled in Tucson, Arizona, attended graduate school, and worked at the university there. Eventually she married and had a daughter, Camille-real-life experience for the fictional mother-daughter relationship created in her first novel, The Bean Trees. Prior to its writing, Kingsolver worked as a freelance journalist and before that as a technical writer. Her novels portray an especial sensitivity to everyday Americans-the shopowners, the unemployed, the single parent fighting to survive-and expose the strength that can be gained by their mutual support of one another.
Guatemalan refugees. The Bean Trees examines, in part, the lives and fates of a pair of young Guatemalan refugees, Estevan and Esperanza, who benefit from a sanctuary run secretly from Tucson, Arizona, to help them and other Central Americans avoid being sent back to their striferidden homelands. While official U.S. policy on political refugees has long been that no one should be forced to return to a nation in which his or her life or safety are judged to be in jeopardy, the reality at the time that Kingsolver was writing the novel was that Guatemalan citizens fleeing that country's horrific human rights abuses were but rarely admitted to the United States.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 3,782 words (approx. 13 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our The Bean Trees Access Pass.
