Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley 2009

Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949 in Los Angeles ) is an American author and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Smiley was born in Los Angeles and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis , Missouri , where she lived until graduating from high school. In 1971 she moved to Europe for a year, where she worked as an archaeologist and tourist guide. She then studied at Vassar College and the University of Iowa a . a. Scandinavian languages ​​and folklore . In 1994 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2001 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

She was married three times: to John Whiston (1970–1975), William Silag (1978–1986) and Stephen M. Mortensen (1987–1997). Two daughters, Phoebe Silag (* 1978) and Lucy Silag (* 1982), and a son, AJ Mortensen (* 1992).

Works

So far, Smiley has written about politics, agriculture, horse training, child rearing, literature, historical topics, the Barbie doll, marriage and much more, which moved Time Magazine to the question of what Jane Smiley couldn't do.

• The Age of Grief (Eng. "In the years of mourning", translated by Karin Rausch, Frankfurt 1988)
• The Greenlanders (German: The Greenland Saga , translated by Karin Rausch, Frankfurt 1990) describes the decline of the Greenlandic settlement of the Vikings between around 1345 and 1415.
• Ordinary Love and Good Will (German Ordinary Love and Good Will  : two novellas, Frankfurt 1995)
• A Thousand Acres (which she in 1992 the Pulitzer Prize was awarded), 1997 filmed as A Thousand Acres by the Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse .
• Moo (German Moo )
• The all-true travels and adventures of Lidie Newton , which takes place in the context of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the resulting conflicts (German: Lidie Newton or an adventurous women's life. From the American. By Manfred Ohl and Hans Sartorius, Frankfurt 2002 )
• Horse Heaven (2000) (Eng. "Fire Horse", 2002), an extensive novel from the world of horse racing with a large number of actors.
• Charles Dickens (2002), a biography of the famous author ( Charles Dickens )
• The Man Who Invented the Computer. The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer . Doubleday (Random House), New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-385-52713-2 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jane Smiley in the catalog of the German National Library