E. Annie Proulx

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Edna Annie Proulx (pronounced Template:IPA) (born August 22, 1935) is an American (with Quebec origins) journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading 8 Academy Awards, taking home 3 of them. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also carried the name E. Annie Proulx.

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Personal Life and Writing

She was born in Norwich, Connecticut and graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine. She then attended Colby College "for a short period in the 1950s." She later returned to school, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts in History in 1969. She got her Master of Arts from Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Quebec in 1973 and pursued, but did not complete, her Ph.D. She started out as a journalist and did not begin writing fiction until she was in her fifties.

A few years after receiving much attention for The Shipping News, she had the following comment on her celebrity status: "It's not good for one's view of human nature, that's for sure. You begin to see, when invitations are coming from festivals and colleges to come read (for an hour for a hefty sum of money), that the institutions are head-hunting for trophy writers. Most don't particularly care about your writing or what you're trying to say. You're there as a human object, one that has won a prize. It gives you a very odd, meat-rack kind of sensation." [1]

Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year's best short story. In 1998, she won for "Brokeback Mountain," which had appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. (The story has since become an award-winning 2005 movie, directed by Ang Lee.) Proulx won again the following year for "The Mud Below," which appeared in The New Yorker June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

She lived for more than 30 years in Vermont, was married three times, and has three sons and a daughter. At age 70, she moved to Arvada, Wyoming, where she writes novels.

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Criticism of Academy Awards

After the film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain lost the best picture Oscar to Crash at the 2006 Academy Awards, Proulx wrote a commentary for the British newspaper The Guardian in which she lambasted the awards show, pondering whether Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, though "brilliant," involved the easier acting skill of "mimicry" (by implication, unlike Heath Ledger's Brokeback Mountain performance). She wrote that the academy members were a "dim LA crowd" and exhibited "insufferable self-importance" when they did not select the film based on her short story, "Brokeback Mountain," as the best picture. Proulx also referred to Crash as "Trash," suggesting that the awards attempted to be safely controversial but by implication were, at worst, homophobic for avoiding honoring Brokeback Mountain, which had won most major awards (including the Golden Globe for best drama) in the lead-up to the Oscars. She suggested that scientology influenced the decision to give Crash best picture.

Several times she referred to the Academy voters and show audience as "heffalumps," an insult that begs for an explanation — though because the elephant is the mascot of the Republican Party, she might be attempting to insinuate that Academy voters suddenly "voted Republican" when deciding which motion picture should win as Best Picture in 2006. Given that Oscar show host Jon Stewart joked that one could not see so many glittering stars in one place without making a donation to the Democratic Party, that presumably would come as a surprise to the Academy and its membership. More likely, she referred to the characteristics of a heffalump, an elephant-like (possibly suggesting a social slowness in the case of the Academy) and reticent/cowardly creature from A.A.Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories.

She also called the performance of the Oscar-winning song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" "violent."

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Bibliography

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Film adaptations

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External links

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