Barbara Kingsolver

Writer

• Born: April 8, 1955
• Place of Birth: Annapolis, Maryland

Biography

When Barbara Kingsolver won a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Pigs in Heaven (1989) after receiving the 1991 PEN West Award for Animal Dreams (1990), her arrival as a serious writer of contemporary American fiction could hardly be questioned; what was not immediately apparent, perhaps, was the breadth of knowledge and experience in the author who brought these works to life. Kingsolver is the daughter of a physician, married a chemist and worked as a research assistant in the Department of Physiology at the University of Arizona. She received a BA (magna cum laude) in 1977 from DePauw University and an MS in 1981 from the University of Arizona and later pursued further graduate study. From 1981 to 1985, she was employed as a technical writer in arid land studies, and from 1985 to 1987, she worked as a freelance journalist before devoting herself to full-time writing in 1987. This background subtly invigorates Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven as Kingsolver adeptly coordinates the intricacies of plot lines that move across ecological, ethnobiological, and regional backdrops.

Kingsolver links the plots of her first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), and Pigs in Heaven through the narrative of Taylor Greer and the Cherokee infant she initially befriends and later adopts, Turtle (named for her tenacious grip on her newfound mother). In these two novels, Kingsolver introduces the primary themes that resound through her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry: the importance of children, the necessity for and intricacies of finding respect for different ethnic worldviews, and the overwhelming joy that accompanies seizing a life full of challenge based on one’s dreams. Kingsolver’s characters invariably opt for the challenges of love created amidst the tensions of intercultural relationships.

This tension of choosing a life amid differing cultural commitments is particularly evident in Animal Dreams. Codi Noline searches for a committed path of her own, even as she steadfastly denies doing so. Codi discovers this path in her ability to help the residents of her father’s hometown, Grace, confront the consequences of industrial pollution. It is easy to see Kingsolver’s emerging human rights activism in Codi’s decision to help the city of Grace fight the threat of pollution. Kingsolver enables Codi to dream herself beyond the demons of her outcast childhood by discovering in herself the will to fight this external enemy. From Loyd Peregrina, a Pueblo Indian, Codi learns the following in an answer to the question, “What do . . . animals dream about?”:

I think they dream about whatever they do when they’re awake. . . . Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it. . . . If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.

Kingsolver’s novels and poems continue to grip the reader long after the details of the individual characters and plots have faded, because they, like Kingsolver’s own life, are grounded in a real-world of ecopolitical action. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1987), High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995), and Small Wonder (2002) admirably present Kingsolver’s real-world engagement. In Holding the Line, Kingsolver unabashedly offers a biased account of the strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation in Morenci and Clifton, Arizona, in 1983. At the time, Kingsolver was working as a freelance journalist, and while Holding the Line certainly presents an account of the actual events of a real strike, what comes through even more clearly is Kingsolver’s desire to show the unexpected strength of the women who enabled the strike to continue long after the men of Clifton had lost their determination. In this respect, Kingsolver calls into question traditional gender roles in the American Southwest and reinforces a tradition of “machisma” that clearly has echoes in her exclusive use of female leading characters in her fiction. High Tide in Tucson is a much gentler collection of stories from her life as she raises her daughter Camille alone. Many of these essays focus on the landscape and culture of the American desert, and most also reflect Kingsolver’s extensive training as a biologist. In “Semper Fi,” for example, Kingsolver addresses the question of fidelity—first to the relatively mundane world of television football, but ultimately to the pursuit of truth itself in investigations into the pseudoscience conducted by Samuel Morton, who in the nineteenth century used brain volume as a measure of ethnic superiority, and by his intellectual heirs (according to Kingsolver) Robert Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994).

In the title essay of High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver suggests a maxim that easily links her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction:

In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace. In other times when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thought tastes as simple as this: let me be a good animal today.

Kingsolver is well known for her best-selling and award-winning 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, about a family of Evangelical Baptist missionaries in the Belgian Congo. Her other novels include Prodigal Summer (2000); The Lacuna (2009), winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for fiction; Flight Behavior (2012); and Unsheltered (2018). Her 2022 contemporary take on Charles Dickens's classic David Copperfield (1849–50), titled Demon Copperhead and set in southern Appalachia, earned her the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2007, she published the nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, a chronicle of her family's yearlong attempt to only eat food produced in their rural community, and in 2020, she returned to poetry for the first time in decades with the publication of How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). A winner of multiple literary honors herself, including the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, in 1999, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize, known since as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, to honor first novels that deal with social justice issues.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Bean Trees, 1988

Animal Dreams, 1990

Pigs in Heaven, 1993

Poisonwood Bible, 1998

Prodigal Summer, 2000

The Lacuna, 2009

Flight Behavior, 2012

Unsheltered, 2018

Demon Copperhead, 2022

Short Fiction:

Homeland, and Other Stories, 1989

Poetry:

Another America/Otra America, 1992

How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), 2020

Nonfiction:

Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, 1989

High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, 1995

Small Wonder, 2002

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, 2007 (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver)

Edited Text:

The Best American Short Stories, 2001, 2001

Bibliography

Aay, Henry. “Environmental Themes in Ecofiction: In the Center of the Nation and Animal Dreams.” Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 14, no. 2, 1994, pp. 65-85.

DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 1999.

Fleischner, Jennifer, editor. A Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver: “The Bean Trees,” “Homeland and Other Stories,” “Animal Dreams,” “Pigs in Heaven.” New York, Harper Perennial, 1994.

Fraser, Alistair. "The Rural Geographies of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer." Jour. of Rural Studies, vol. 35, 2014, pp. 143–51.

Gaard, Greta. “Living Connections with Animals and Nature.” In Eco-Feminism: Women, Animals, Nature, edited by Greta Gaard. Temple University Press, 1993.

Kingsolver, Barbara. "Barbara Kingsolver Was Writing Social Justice Novels before They Were Cool." Slate, 17 Oct. 2022, slate.com/culture/2022/10/barbara-kingsolver-interview-demon-copperhead-appalachia-identity-politics.html. Accessed 20 June 2024.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly, vol. 237, 31 Aug. 1990, pp. 46.

Marshall, John. “Fast Ride on ‘Pigs.’” Review of Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. Seattle Post-Gazette, 26 July 1993, p. 1.

Rauwerda, Antje M. The Writer and the Overseas Childhood: The Third Culture Literature of Kingsolver, McEwan and Others. McFarland, 2012.

Tan, Ian. Understanding Barbara Kingsolver. U of South Carolina Press, 2024.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible”: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2009.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Barbara Kingsolver's World: Nature, Art, and the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.