E Annie Proulx

E. Annie Proulx (Edna Annie Proulx) , 1935-, American writer, b. Norwich, Conn., grad. Univ. of Vermont (B.A., 1969), Sir George Williams (now Concordia) Univ., Montreal (M.A., 1973). She was a journalist, wrote nonfiction articles for numerous publications, and was the author of several "how-to" books before beginning to write fiction in her 50s. Her stories and novels often feature barren landscapes, tough idiosyncratic characters, and a frequently bleak humor. Her first two volumes of fiction, Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988) and the novel Postcards (1992), won considerable critical praise. The Shipping News (1993), a novel that exhibits a superb sense of place and character, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. It is set mainly in a desolate seaside community in Newfoundland and tells of a widowed father's attempt to create a home. After the novel Accordion Crimes (1996), Proulx, who had moved to Wyoming in 1995, turned to the American West as the setting and motif for three volumes of Wyoming stories, Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). In spare yet finely wrought prose, these tales observe the harsh and hardscrabble lives of Wyoming natives with shrewdness, wry humor, and tough-minded irony. Western themes also mark the novel That Old Ace in the Hole (2002), which is set in the Southwest.

Proulx, E. Annie ( Edna Annie Proulx) (1935– ), American novelist who has achieved critical and commercial success since her first novel, Postcards (1991), made her the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Prize. Her second, The Shipping News (1993), won her other awards and a large British readership. In both of these, in Accordion Crimes (1996), and in her collected short stories (Hearts Songs and Other Stories, US, 1998; Heart Songs, UK, 1995) she combines two powerful strands of American writing: a regionalist emphasis on particular places and an encyclopedic attempt to grasp the diversity of America. For her short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (1997) and her subsequent novel That Old Ace in the Hole (2003) she dropped the E and published as Annie Proulx.