Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and short-story writer renowned for her ability to blend the ordinary with the extraordinary, often incorporating elements of magic and fantasy into her narratives. Born on March 16, 1952, in New York City, she developed a deep love for literature from a young age, influenced by her mother’s passion for reading. Hoffman's literary career began in earnest after she earned her Master of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1975, leading to the publication of her debut novel, *Property Of*, in 1977, which received critical acclaim.
Throughout her career, Hoffman has explored various themes, including family dynamics, love, and fear, often infusing her stories with a sense of magic realism. Her notable works include *Practical Magic*, which was adapted into a film, and *Dovekeepers*, praised as one of her masterpieces. She has also ventured into children's literature, publishing several titles that reflect her signature style. Hoffman's writing is characterized by compassionate storytelling that resonates with a broad audience, securing her reputation as both a commercial and literary author.
Alice Hoffman
Author
- Born: March 16, 1952
- Place of Birth: New York, New York
AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT-STORY WRITER
Biography
Alice Hoffman is the author of several novels and short stories. She has also written screenplays. She has a knack for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and writing is her only vocation.
Hoffman was born on March 16, 1952, in New York City. Her father, a real estate agent, and her mother, a social worker, divorced when she was eight. After her parents’ separation, Hoffman remained with her mother, a university-educated woman and an avid reader. As she grew up in Franklin Square on Long Island, New York, Hoffman spent much of her time immersed in literature. She was a voracious reader with a passion for science fiction, fairy tales, and anything to do with magic. Stories about ordinary families encountering the fantastic were Hoffman’s favorites.
Hoffman has never outgrown her childhood interest in magic or love of creating her own fantasy worlds. From a young age, she enjoyed writing. Throughout her childhood, she filled notebooks with different versions of spectacular fantasy worlds and said that she “always wanted to be a writer.” After graduating from high school, she entered Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. She received encouragement from her professors and gradually began to gain confidence in her work. After she completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973, she was awarded a Mirelles Fellowship to the Master of Fine Arts program at Stanford University. While attending Stanford, Hoffman studied under Albert Guerard. Hoffman earned her Master of Arts (MA) degree in 1975, and the following summer, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont.
As Hoffman pursued her M.A. degree, her work began to appear in print. Magazines including Ms., Redbook, Fiction, and American Review published her short stories and helped launch her career. Before she even had a chance to cultivate her reputation as a short-story writer, a publishing house contacted her about writing a novel. The novel she delivered was Property Of. Published in 1977, Property Of quickly garnered critical praise and was hailed as “an impressive debut.” With Property Of, the story of a troubled love affair between a seventeen-year-old girl and the leader of an urban gang, Hoffman established herself as a realist capable of rendering everyday occurrences as something fabulous.
In 1979, Hoffman published her second novel, The Drowning Season (1979). The central characters are Esther the White, a Russian émigré, and her granddaughter, Esther the Black; the story revolves around their family dynamics. Critics praising the novel have said that its mythic features and hypnotic language are its best qualities. Library Journal named Hoffman’s The Drowning Season one of the notable books of 1979.
By the time The Drowning Season was published, Hoffman had married, and she and her husband, Tom Martin, a screenwriter, moved to Boston. There, Hoffman met Faith Sales, a vice president and executive editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Sales became her editor, mentor, and friend, and with Sales’s guidance, Hoffman completed two novels in rapid succession. In 1980, Angel Landing appeared, and White Horses followed in 1982.
Before Hoffman’s fifth novel, Fortune’s Daughter (1985), was published, her first son, Jake, was born. According to her, it was while she was pregnant—she assumed she was carrying a girl—that the idea for the novel came to her. She told one interviewer, “I thought a great deal about what it means to have a daughter, to want to give someone everything you didn’t have.” She translated her musings into a hauntingly lyrical tale concerned with the loss of children.
The subject of Hoffman’s next two novels, Illumination Night (1987) and At Risk (1988), is fear. In Illumination Night, Hoffman examines the effects of a character’s agoraphobia—an affliction from which she herself has suffered—on her family. The subject of At Risk is the fear of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Hoffman, who gave birth to her second son, Zack, shortly after the novel was published, has suggested that her own paranoia about the disease and her fears about how it could affect her own children prompted her to write the novel.
Hoffman’s work has always been imbued with a sense of magic and witchcraft, which has become increasingly prominent in her work. Seventh Heaven (1990) takes place in 1959 in Long Island, where single mother Nora Silk moves to town and challenges the conformity of her new neighbors. Turtle Moon (1991) is a murder mystery set in a town in Florida where the turtles emerge from the waters in May, and everyone goes a little crazy. Second Nature (1994) begins with a woman impulsively bringing a man who had been raised by wolves home from a psychiatric institution, and then it follows his learning of a “second nature” as a human in a latter-day Beauty and the Beast story. Practical Magic (1995) follows the (mis)adventures in love of two sisters from childhood to adulthood, frequently derailed by the fact that both are witches whose love spells tend to go awry. This novel is perhaps Hoffman’s best known, and it was made into a film in 1998.
Here on Earth (1997) relates the events after March Murray returned to her hometown for a funeral and became involved with all the people she had left behind when she moved to California. Local Girls (1999) is a series of fifteen interconnected short stories that visit Gretel Samuelsen, her best friend, her mother, and her mother’s cousin at points throughout Gretel’s adolescence. The River King (2000) takes place at a New England boarding school, where love triangles among both faculty and students have a tragic outcome. Blue Diary (2001) explores the aftermath of a seemingly perfect man’s arrest for a long-ago rape and murder—a crime which he admits committing, but from which he claims to have redeemed himself by his subsequent behavior. The Probable Future (2003) concerns a modern family with magical gifts. Both Blue Diary and Probable Future were New York Times Best Sellers.
Blackbird House (2004) is a collection of tales about Blackbird House, a small Cape Cod farm, and its various inhabitants over time. Hoffman published two novels in 2005: The Ice Queen is the story of a woman whose wish to be struck by lightning comes true, while Skylight Confessions is about a family who moves into a glass house in Connecticut. Third Angel (2008) centers on a London hotel, in which a tragic accident took place years ago, and three women who fall in love with the wrong people. The Story Sisters (2009) title characters Elisabeth, Meg, and Claire live with their mother in Long Island. Hoffman follows them as they grow older, and their paths diverge.
Hoffman published two books in 2011. The novel The Red Garden gives readers a sense of life in small-town New England over three centuries via the characters of fictional Blackwell, Massachusetts, whose center is the eponymous garden. Dovekeepers takes readers to ancient Israel to witness four different women who have come to Masada, a desert mountaintop fortress in which the Romans besieged nine hundred Jews in 70 Common Era. The novel earned Hoffman praise, and several critics consider it her masterpiece. In 2013, Hoffman published a nonfiction volume entitled Survival Lessons, which she wrote as a guide to help those facing crises “of illness or loss,” such as the one she faced when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age forty-five.
Hoffman continued to write fiction in the 2010s. A young woman who stars as a mermaid at her father’s Coney Island freak show becomes involved with a Russian immigrant photographer in The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014). Marriage of Opposites (2015), set in St. Thomas in the nineteenth century, tells the story of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro’s mother. Hoffman’s novel Faithful was published in November 2016. Hoffman has also published The Rules of Magic (2017)a prequel to Practical MagicThe World That We Knew (2019), Magic Lessons (2020)another prequel to Practical MagicThe Book of Magic (2021)a sequel to Practical Magicand The Invisible Hour (2023).
In 1997, Hoffman began publishing children’s books in addition to her adult novels. Fireflies: A Winter’s Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), Aquamarine (2001), Indigo (2002), Green Angel (2003), Green Witch (2010), and Green Heart (2012), among others, all deal with varying types of love and loss, with a hefty dose of Hoffman’s trademark magical realism. Nightbird (2015) is a chapter book about a twelve-year-old named Twig and the witches who move in next door. Since the publication of At Risk, which generated much critical interest, Hoffman has been compared with such writers as Anne Tyler and Mary Gordon. Her body of work has secured her reputation as a writer whose work is both commercial and literary, and it is considered compassionate and accessible.
Bibliography
“About - Learn More About Novelist Alice Hoffman.” Alice Hoffman, alicehoffman.com/about. Accessed 23 July 2024.
“Alice Hoffman's New Book Will Imagine Anne Frank's Life Before She Kept a Diary.” USNews.com, 4 Jan. 2024, www.usnews.com/news/entertainment/articles/2024-01-04/alice-hoffmans-novel-about-anne-frank-will-be-published-in-september. Accessed 23 July 2024.
Davis, Alan. “Family Fictions.” Hudson Review, vol. 60, no. 1, 2002, pp. 161–67.
Hoffman, Alice. “Alice Hoffman: By the Book.” New York Times Sunday Book Review, 20 Feb. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/books/review/alice-hoffman-by-the-book.html. Accessed 23 July 2024.
Pinsker, Sansford. “The Grip of Family in the Novels of Alice Hoffman and David Small.” Critique, vol. 38, no. 4, 1997, pp. 251–62.
Steinitz, Rebecca. “Wuthering Depths.” Women’s Review of Books, vol. 15, no. 6, 1998, pp. 6–8.