Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie , 1947-, American writer, b. Washington, D.C. She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories in The New Yorker magazine and won acclaim with the 1976 publication of her novel Chilly Scenes of Winter and her story collection Distortions, both chronicling with ironic wit the disillusionments of the upper-middle-class generation that came of age in the 1960s. Her keenly observed and dryly matter-of-fact early narratives of everyday life are often cast in the present tense. In her later work, especially that beginning in the 1990s, she largely concentrates on the same generation—grown older, more ruminative, but not happier—and their often listless progeny. In these works Beattie often employs a much less minimalist style and achieves a new emotional depth as she explores themes that include the sadnesses of middle age and the alienation of characters whose relationships and very lives seem inevitably to falter. Her other fiction includes the novels Falling in Place (1981), Picturing Will (1990), Another You (1995), and The Doctor's House (2002) and the short stories in The Burning House (1983), What Was Mine (1991), Park City (1998), Perfect Recall (2000), and Follies (2005).

Bibliography: See studies by C. Murphy (1986) and J. B. Montresor, ed. (1993).

Beattie, Ann (1947–), born in Washington, D.C. Her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), presents a man in his twenties lonely and yearning for love, a frustrated, bewildered figure of the 1960s; and her second, Falling in Place (1980), set in the late 1970s, treats the loveless marriage of an advertising executive aged 40; Love Always (1985) deals with a writer about love who is deserted by her lover; Alex Katz (1987) dramatizes a painter; and Picturing Will (1990) renders a special situation in depicting the life of 5‐year‐old Will, whose mother goes to work as a photographer when deserted by her now remarried husband (Will's father) and is having a romance with a new man. Recent novels include My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) and The Doctor's House (2002). Distortions (1976), was her first book of short stories; it was followed by the story collections Secrets and Surprises (1978), The Burning House (1982), and Where You'll Find Me (1986). Park City (1998) brought together new and selected stories, and more stories were gathered in Perfect Recall (2001). In 2000, Beattie won the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize for excellence in short fiction.