During the last decades of the twentieth century, Anna Quindlen emerged as an important novelist. Her works address a variety of topics, ranging from the maturation of a girl in a large Irish Italian family to sobering depictions of fatal diseases and domestic violence. While Quindlen has sometimes been viewed as a novelist addressing women's issues, her work possesses universal appeal.

Anna Quindlen was born on 8 July 1952 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest of five siblings. Her father, Robert V. Quindlen, was a management consultant of Irish extraction, and her mother, Prudence Quindlen, came from an Italian family and worked in the home. Even as a youth, Quindlen found herself drawn to writing. Raised in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Drexel Hill, Quindlen attended private parochial schools and earned her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1974. Quindlen's upbringing was steeped in the strong traditions of Catholicism, as...