Barbara Kingsolver

From Free net encyclopedia

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 18, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels, poems, short stories, and essays, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".

1 Biography
2 Literary themes
3 Books
4 References
5 External links

[edit]

Biography

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, “out in the country, in the middle of an alfalfa field.” Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary and lonely one, but she also recalls with affection that the time she spent by herself helped to stimulate an “elaborate life of the mind”. By the time she was 8 years old, Kingsolver had already started keeping journals, filling “drawers and drawers” with them.

After high school, she left Carlisle for Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She attended on a music scholarship and studied classical piano; but eventually, she says, “it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play ‘Blue Moon’ in a hotel lobby”, and she changed her major to biology.

After graduating from Depauw, Kingsolver left for Europe. With little money, she traveled the continent and took whatever work she could find: mostly on archaeological digs, but also some translating. Her work visa became more difficult to renew, and she decided to move to Arizona. Kingsolver worked as a laboratory assistant and later enrolled as a graduate student in biology at the University of Arizona. For a time she studied the social life of termites. She finished an M.S. degree but then, disillusioned with academia, left the Ph.D. program and took a job as a science writer for the university. The science writing led to some freelance feature writing, which eventually allowed her to quit her job as a science writer.

Although she had written fiction and poetry for years, she had shown her work to no-one. With more time on her hands, she began writing in earnest and took a creative writing course. Her creative writing teacher gave her a copy of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories, which she says helped her to find her voice. Finally she entered a short story contest—and won. “1983. That was the year that I wrote in block letters in my journal, I AM A WRITER. And I felt this great relief, you know, that I’d found an identity that felt true and honest.”

Her first published story, Rose-Johnny, appeared in the Virginia Quarterly in 1987 (and was later collected in Homeland). During a period of chronic insomnia that accompanied her first pregnancy, she wrote her first novel, The Bean Trees, which was published in 1988. “It’s taken me a long while to understand, really, what I am and who I am,” Kingsolver says. “I had to realize that I’m very much formed by living in a small town, and that the things I value most have to do with community, and the ways that people know each other in a rural place, and the way they depend on each other.”

This was followed by the non-fiction book Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike in 1983; a short story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989); the novels Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible(1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection Another America (1992); and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson(1995) and Small Wonder (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner awards, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Barbara Kingsolver lives with her husband Steven Hopp, and their two daughters, Camille and Lily. They divide their time between Tuscon, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia.

[edit]

Literary themes

Social justice is an important theme in the work The Bean Trees, and throughout her novels. In this novel the main character, Taylor, meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants, who explain how they were forced to leave their daughter behind to escape torture and death in their home country. Social justice is also a central theme in her poetry collection, Another America.

In The Poisonwood Bible she examines the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa. She is critical of Western governments in her novels and many of her essays.

Native Americans are a prominent theme in several of Kingsolver's books and a few of her poems, especially relating to the prejudice against Native Americans by white settlers and the Trail of Tears. Her book Pigs in Heaven (a sequel to The Bean Trees) features Turtle, a Cherokee child who was abandoned and left to Taylor. This book highlights the conditions of Native Americans currently in Oklahoma, and the continuation of their traditional ways despite poverty and continuing inequality.

Poverty is the focus of several of her books such as Holding the Line, a book about the Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. Taylor, the main character of Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, grew up in poverty and has to continually struggle against it.

The natural world is a theme in much of Kingsolver’s writing, reflecting her training in biology. In The Poisonwood Bible, the plants that the Prices bring from America fail to take root in African soil, Adah trains as a microbiologist, and the village is eventually taken over by the forest. In Prodigal Summer, the main characters are associated with some form of animal or plant life: Deanna with the predatory jackal, Lusa with the mating lunar moth, and the elderly couple Garnett and Nannie with old chestnut trees.

[edit]