Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie is an acclaimed American author known for her minimalist writing style and profound exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the disillusionment of contemporary life. Born in 1947, she grew up as an only child and later pursued her education in literature, earning a BA from American University and an MA from the University of Connecticut. Beattie's literary career began in the 1970s, gaining recognition for her short stories published in prestigious magazines. Her debut novel, *Chilly Scenes of Winter*, was released in 1976, alongside her first short story collection, *Distortions*.
Throughout her career, Beattie has published numerous works, including both fiction and essays, and has received several prestigious awards for her contributions to literature. She often reflects on the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War, capturing their experiences with irony and emotional depth. Over time, her writing evolved from a focus on bleak themes to a more optimistic perspective. Additionally, Beattie has held academic positions at notable institutions, including Harvard and the University of Virginia, where she is recognized as the Edgar Allan Poe Professor Emerita. Her recent works, such as *Onlookers* and *More to Say: Essays and Appreciations*, delve into contemporary issues, illustrating her ongoing relevance in American literature.
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Subject Terms
Ann Beattie
Writer
- Born: September 8, 1947
- Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.
Author Profile
Born Charlotte Ann Beattie, the only child of a homemaker and a government official, Ann Beattie has said that she developed an identity as an “adult-child” who, although dependable and mature, continued to surround herself with toys and called her writing a playtime activity. She has also suggested that as a teenager she suffered from an undiagnosed clinical depression. Her insightful depiction of too-mature children and of depressive personalities can be traced back to her own formative years. Beattie came into her own at American University, where she discovered literature, earning a BA in 1969; she completed an MA at the University of Connecticut in 1970. Finding the graduate program uninspiring, however, she turned to writing about her own peer group, who grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam War and whose experiments with sexual freedom and drug use produced a flourishing counterculture. Her marriage to the writer and musician David Gates followed a nontraditional route, with no plans for children and with a circle of friends replacing a network of family relations. She made her name with short stories written in a minimalist style and published in magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1976, she published her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, as well as her first short story collection, Distortions. Beattie’s life and work were peopled at this time by well-educated men and women in their late twenties or early thirties, living in comfortable country houses not too far from Manhattan and possessing the freedom and the funds to fly to Europe or to the West Coast, to break off marriages, blend new families, change jobs, partners, and sexual orientation at the prompting of their own desires, all the while listening to the latest, best music and catching the best new films.
She published another short story collection in the 1970s, Secrets and Surprises (1978), and then eight more through 2015, including The New Yorker Stories (2011). Chilly Scenes of Winter was adapted as a movie, Head over Heels (1979), rereleased with a different ending in 1982 as Chilly Scenes of Winter. Beattie continued publishing novels, including Falling in Place (1981), Love Always (1986), The Doctor's House (2002), and Mrs. Nixon (2011), the last a fictionalized account of the life of First Lady Patricia Nixon.
The theme of Beattie’s fiction is that the expectation of a happier life promised by the Woodstock generation did not come to pass. Many of her bleak early stories anticipated the end of her marriage to Gates, whom she divorced in 1980. Beattie moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she settled with her second husband, the painter Lincoln Perry. While her early stories explored love and loss in a disturbingly unemotional and ironic way, her later work is warmer, more generous, and more optimistic. It is her early fiction, however, with its sense of disappointment and despair, that has supplied her with an identity as the voice of another lost generation.
Beattie has taught at Harvard, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Virginia, where she is the Edgar Allan Poe Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 2000, among other awards.
Beattie published her short story collection The Accomplished Guest in 2017. She followed that release with her novel A Wonderful Stroke of Luck in 2019. The author then published her collection Onlookers (2023), which dealt with many of the issues that plague modern Americans, including the COVID-19 pandemic, population growth, and societal instability. In 2023, Beattie also published her first nonfiction collection, More to Say: Essays and Appreciations.
Bibliography
Aldridge, John. “Less Is a Lot Less (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme).” Talents and Technicians. New York: Scribner’s, 1992. Print.
Barth, John. “A Few Words about Minimalism.” New York Times. New York Times, 28 Dec. 1986. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
Beattie, Ann. "Ann Beattie: By the Book." Interview. New York Times. New York Times, 26 Aug. 2015. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
Beattie, Ann. “An Interview with Ann Beattie.” Interview by Steven R. Centola. Contemporary Literature 31 (Winter 1990): 405–22. Print.
Deresiewicz, William. "Beattitudes: On Ann Beattie." Nation. Nation, 22 Nov. 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
Garner, Dwight. "Ann Beattie's Stories Confront Charlottesville, a City Remade." The New York Times, 10 July 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/books/review/ann-beattie-onlookers.html. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
Lee, Don. “About Ann Beattie.” Ploughshares 21.2–3 (1995): 231–35. Print.
Montresor, Jaye Berman, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. Print.
Stein, Lorin. “Fiction in Review.” Rev. of My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, by Ann Beattie. Yale Review 85.4 (1997): 156–65. Print.
Trouard, Dawn, ed. Conversations with Ann Beattie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007. Print.
Young, Michael W., and Troy Thibodeaux. “Ann Beattie.” A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English. Ed. Erin Fallon et al. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. Print.