Annie Proulx is an acclaimed author of award-winning and best-selling novels, short story collections, and journalistic pieces. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, “Postcards,” the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel, “The Shipping News,” and her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted into an Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.
Proulx's writing style is darkly comedic and peppered with sadness. Her worlds are filled with eccentric, memorable individuals and unconventional families. She traveled extensively, researching physical backgrounds and locations, and used regional speech patterns while incorporating surprising and often sarcastic language. Her novels and short stories frequently contain unexpected plot twists about families falling apart while remaining attached to the land.
Proulx was born Edna Ann Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut in 1935. She briefly attended Colby College in the 1950s, later studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, where she graduated cum laude with a degree in history. She then earned her masters from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Quebec in 1973.
Proulx started her career as a journalist, but her first published works were in fiction. Her science fiction stories "The Customs Lounge" and “All the Pretty Horses” were published within a year of each other, with her first short story collection being published in 1988 and her first novel in 1992. She went on to earn several awards and accolades, including a NEA fellowship in 1992, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1993, the Dos Passos Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes: one for “Brokeback Mountain” and one for “The Mud Below.”
Proulx lived for more than 30 years in northern Vermont before moving to Saratoga, Wyoming. She also spent part of the year in northern Newfoundland on a small cove. She maintained a close relationship with the land, which she wrote about frequently in freelance articles for magazines such as Gourmet. Works that focus on this include “Plan and Make Your Own Fences & Gates, Walkways, Walls & Drives,” “The Fine Art of Salad Gardening,” and “Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider.”
Other notable works of fiction by Proulx include “Accordion Crimes,” “That Old Ace in the Hole,” and “Barkskins.” Her short story collections include “Close Range: Wyoming Stories,” “Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2,” and “Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.”