Marilynne Summers Robinson’s brother predicted that she would be a poet when she was young. Considering she would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, National Humanities Medal, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, he wasn’t far off about her writing career.
Robinson is an American novelist and essayist best known for her first novel, Housekeeping, and a series of interconnected novels about the Boughton and Ames families called Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack. She has stated that any of the books in the tetralogy can be an entry point to the story about the families and can therefore be read in any order.
Robinson was born in 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho. She attended the former women’s college at Brown University, Pembroke College, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts. In 1977, she received her Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of Washington.
While working on her dissertation, Robinson wrote Housekeeping as an experiment with metaphors from the transparent eyeball perspective. The book, which is the story of Ruth, her sister Lucille, and the eccentric aunt that cares for them after their mother’s suicide, became a classic. However, it would be 20 years before her next novel was released.
During that interlude, she focused mainly on non-fiction and authored many articles and essays, including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution; The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought; and What Are We Doing Here? She also served on the faculty of the University of Iowa from 1991 to 2016.
From 2004 to 2020, Robinson released the Gilead series, described by The New Yorker as “an intergenerational saga of race, religion, family, and forgiveness centered on a small Iowa town.” The books portray the same series of events during the same time period told from the different perspectives of the family members. Home won the Orange Prize for Fiction and Lila the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Robinson has also delivered a series of lectures at Yale University and, in 2011, gave the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters.