Ann Beattie was born in Washington, D.C., on September 8, 1947, and grew up in the Washington suburbs. She attended American University in the 1960s where she majored in English, studying writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Updike. These writers clearly influenced Beattie's writing. She completed a master's degree at the University of Connecticut, and although she began work on a Ph.D., she did not complete the degree once she began having success publishing her stories.

It was while she worked with writer J. D. O'Hara during the early years of the 1970s that Beattie began placing her stories in such prestigious publications as the Atlantic and the Virginia Quarterly. After rejecting twenty of her stories, the New Yorker published "A Platonic Relationship" in 1974, leading Beattie to a long association with the magazine. "Imagined Scenes" was first published in the Texas Quarterly...