E. Annie Proulx

American novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and author of how-to guides

• Born: August 22, 1935
• Place of Birth: Norwich, Connecticut

Biography

The first of five daughters, Edna Annie Proulx was born August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut, to George Proulx, vice president of a textile company, and Lois Proulx, a painter who traced her family history in Connecticut back to the year 1635. Lois Proulx was an amateur naturalist who encouraged the young Annie to observe small details of everyday life and the natural world. This habit later developed into the detailed research that contributed depth and realism to Proulx’s fiction.

In the early 1950s, Proulx briefly attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine, but left without a degree. She returned to college in 1963 and, in 1969, graduated cum laude from the University of Vermont with a bachelor of arts degree in history. During these years, Proulx was married and divorced three times. A daughter from her first marriage lived with Proulx’s first former husband, while Proulx raised three sons from her second and third marriages.

In 1973, Proulx graduated from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal with a master of arts degree in history. She completed all the work for a doctoral degree in Renaissance European economics and passed the oral examinations in 1975 but decided not to complete her dissertation, as there were so few teaching jobs available in her field.

Proulx had been drawn from an early age to the outdoor life. After leaving school, she moved to a small cabin in the Vermont woods and spent much time hunting, fishing, and canoeing. In the 1980s, she supported herself and her sons by working as a freelance journalist, publishing dozens of magazine articles on topics ranging from fishing and making cider to growing apples and lettuce. Eventually, she accepted assignments to write do-it-yourself handbooks about gardening, cooking, and home-building projects. These books often provided historical illustrations and background in addition to instructional material, early evidence of Proulx’s devotion to research and historical detail. In 1986, she received a Garden Writers Association of America award for her how-to books and cookbooks. Although the subject matter reflected Proulx’s interest in the back-to-the-land movement and self-sufficiency, she found nonfiction manuals less interesting to write over time.

While attending graduate school, Proulx enjoyed writing fiction and published several short stories in Seventeen magazine. Even while writing nonfiction on assignment, she produced one or two short stories each year. Though she could sell most of her short stories, Proulx never thought she could make a living writing fiction. Two of her early stories were listed as “Distinguished Short Stories” in Best American Short Stories for 1983 and 1987.

In the early 1980s, Tom Jenks, an editor at Esquire magazine, accepted three of Proulx’s stories for publication, giving her exposure to a larger, national audience. When Jenks took a job at the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, he offered Proulx an opportunity to publish her first collection, Heart Songs, and Other Stories. Although Heart Songs was well-reviewed, Proulx, then in her early fifties, still did not think of herself as a writer.

Although Proulx had no desire to write longer fiction, Jenks had included a clause in her publishing contract committing her to write a novel. With financial support from arts foundations in Vermont and Wyoming and inspired by a collection of old postcards with mug shots of escaped convicts, Proulx began writing fiction full-time. Her first novel, Postcards (1992), tells the story of a Vermont family struggling to keep their farm afloat after their son murders his girlfriend and leaves home. Proulx was surprised to find longer fiction less demanding to write than the short story. Rather than paring down her prose, she could expand on what she wished to say. Critics hailed Postcards as an emotionally powerful and brilliantly written debut. When Proulx won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Postcards, she was the first woman to receive the award in its twelve-year history. The same year that Postcards came out, Proulx received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction.

Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), tells the story of a man trying to repair his shattered life by returning to his family home in the harsh landscape of Newfoundland. Proulx had become interested in Newfoundland during a fishing trip there and spent months revisiting the country to absorb the local atmosphere that could lend authenticity to her book. Her ability to evoke the bleak landscape's loneliness and chill and capture a people caught in the throes of economic and social upheaval earned her more critical praise. In 1994, The Shipping News received the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award for fiction, the National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was translated into eight languages, and a successful film version was released in 2001.

Proulx’s next novel, Accordion Crimes (1996), follows an accordion built in Italy and passed among a succession of owners to tell an often violent story of the American immigrant experience. Accordion Crimes was inspired partly by Proulx’s family background. Her father’s family had come to New England from Canada, sacrificing many of their cultural traditions to become truly American. Proulx originally planned to set the book in Texas but needed a fellowship to do research there. She recast the book over a wider geographical range when her funding fell through. After traveling extensively to promote Accordion Crimes, Proulx decided to stop making personal appearances, which she felt took too much time away from her writing. After her mother died in 1995, Proulx moved from a house in Vermont—which she largely built—to Wyoming, where she had done most of her fiction writing even while maintaining her residence in Vermont.

Proulx received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature from Longwood University in 1997. The following year, she earned a National Magazine Award for the story “Brokeback Mountain,” later included in her collection of short fiction Close Range: Wyoming Stories. In 2000, Close Range received the English-Speaking Union’s Ambassador Book Award and a book award for best fiction from The New Yorker. Stories from Close Range were included in The Best American Short Stories 1998 (1998), Prize Stories, 1998: The O. Henry Awards (1998), The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999), Prize Stories, 1999: The O. Henry Awards (1999), The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999), and The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000). In 2000, Proulx won the Women Writing the West’s WILLA Literary Award, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather.

Proulx followed Close Range with two other volumes in the Wyoming Stories series, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004) and Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (2008), in addition to the novels That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) and Barkskins (2016).

An Academy Award-winning 2005 film adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain,” directed by Ang Lee, brought Proulx notoriety and further fame. Because of its homosexual content, the film also elicited mixed responses from movie-going audiences in the United States and was censored in several countries. Proulx later noted in interviews that she regretted ever writing the story because of the complaints and recommended revisions she received from viewers and readers unhappy about its ending. Despite that, Proulx was pleased with the film. She subsequently produced the libretto for an operatic version, which premiered in Spain in 2014, and a stage version debuted on the London stage in 2016.

Proulx was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. Around that time, she moved from a remote area of Wyoming, the setting of her 2011 memoir Bird Cloud, to a town outside Seattle, Washington. Her next novel, Barkskins (2016), explores the ramifications of deforestation through the story of two Frenchmen who work as woodcutters in exchange for land in 1690s New France (modern-day Canada). In 2022, Proulx authored a piece in The New Yorker entitled "Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only Let Them," highlighting the importance of protecting forests and swamps to preserve the Earth and slow climate change. Her nonfiction, Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (2022), echoed this theme.

In 2017, Proulx was awarded the Lifetime Achievement National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The following year, she was recognized for her contributions to literature with the 2018 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Proulx is one of several late-twentieth-century American writers, such as Carolyn Chute and Cormac McCarthy, whose fiction deals with rural life in particular regions of the United States. Proulx’s fiction examines how individuals in poor communities survive social, economic, and geological upheaval—how such people react when traditional and long-standing ways of life are assaulted by modernization, urbanization, and social change. The French-inspired approach to studying history Proulx learned in Montreal helped form her approach to fiction writing, which links the individual's experience with the historical time and place in which it occurs. Proulx’s work concerns the impact of historical time, places, and events on her characters’ lives rather than individual introspection. It often examines characters’ relationships to large social movements and the land they live on.

Proulx draws on her background as a historian to research her novels extensively, often traveling to the places about which she writes and working to master details of period, language, and local customs. Much of her fiction reflects the harsh climate and hardscrabble quality of rural life, and most of her characters come to a bad end. Praised for her sweeping vision of the American experience, poetic mastery of language, and offbeat, often dark humor, Proulx’s work has been compared to that of the American novelists Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Postcards, 1992

The Shipping News, 1993

Accordion Crimes, 1996

That Old Ace in the Hole, 2002

Barkskins, 2016

Short Fiction:

Heart Songs, and Other Stories, 1988

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999 (watercolors by William Matthews)

Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, 2004

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, 2008

Nonfiction:

Great Grapes! Grow the Best Ever, 1980

Making the Best Apple Cider, 1980

Sweet and Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It, 1980 (with Lew Nichols; reprinted as Cider: Making, Using, and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider, 1997)

Make Your Own Insulated Window Shutters, 1981

“What’ll You Take for It?”: Back to Barter, 1981

The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook: How to Make Everything from Cheese to Custard in Your Own Kitchen, 1982 (with Nichols)

The Gardener’s Journal and Record Book, 1983

Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls, and Drives, 1983

The Fine Art of Salad Gardening, 1985

The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results, 1987

Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, 2006 (with Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana)

Bird Cloud: A Memoir, 2011

Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, 2022

Edited Text:

The Best American Short Stories, 1997: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines, 1997 (with Katrina Kenison)

Roaring in the Blood: Remembering Robert F. Jones, 2006 (photography by Bill Eppridge)

Red Desert: History of a Place, 2008 (photography by Martin Stupich)

Drama:

Brokeback Mountain: Opera in Two Acts, 2014 (libretto; music by Charles Wuorinen)

Bibliography

Asquith, Mark. The Lost Frontier: Reading Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Cox, Christopher. "Annie Proulx: The Art of Fiction No. 199." The Paris Review, no. 188, Spring 2009, pp. 22–49. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=38707340&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 6 Apr. 2017.

Depenbrock, Julie. "In 'Fen, Bog & Swamp,' Annie Proulx Pens a History of Wetland Destruction." NPR, 11 Oct. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/10/11/1127959575/annie-proulx-book-wetlands. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Elder, Richard. “Don’t Fence Me In.” The New York Times, May 23, 1999, p. 8.

Hunt, Alex, editor. The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism. Lexington, 2011.

Hustak, Alan. “An Uneasy Guest of Honor.” The Montreal Gazette, 10 June 1999, p. D10.

Liss, Barbara. “Wild, Wearying Wyoming.” Review of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by E. Annie Proulx. The Houston Chronicle, 20 June 1999, p. Z23.

Proulx, Annie. “Why Do We Write?” Writer's Chronicle, vol. 46, no. 6, 2014, p. 60. Supplemental Index.

Proulx, Annie. "Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only Let Them." The New Yorker, 27 June 2022, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/swamps-can-protect-against-climate-change-if-we-only-let-them. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Rock, Lucky. "Annie Proulx: ‘I’ve had a Life. I see How Slippery Things Can Be’." Guardian, 5 June 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/05/annie-proulx-ive-had-a-life-i-see-how-slippery-things-can-be. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Rood, Karen L. Understanding Annie Proulx. University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

See, Carolyn. “Proulx’s Wild West.” The Washington Post, 2 July 1999, p. C2.

"The Hadal Zone." The New Yorker, 30 June 2024, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/08/the-hadal-zone-fiction-annie-proulx. Accessed 20 July 2024.