

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.īorn in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. This potent conjuring of many lives across generations is a stunning tour de force. Rich with humor and wisdom, twists and surprises, Some Luck takes us through deeply emotional cycles of births and deaths, passions, and betrayals, displaying Smiley's dazzling virtuosity, compassion, and understanding of human nature and the nature of history, never discounting the role of fate and chance.

Moving from post-World War I America through the early 1950s, Some Luck gives us an intimate look at this family's triumphs and tragedies, zooming in on the realities of farm life, while casting-as the children grow up and scatter to New York, California, and everywhere in between-a panoramic eye on the monumental changes that marked the first half of the twentieth century. On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different and Claire, who earns the highest place in her father's heart.
