MARY CLEARMAN B LEW
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYNNE ROBINSON
December 2009 Marilynne Robinson was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho. Her novel Housekeeping (1980) won a Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Gilead (2004), received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award. Her third novel, Home (2008), was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear PolLution (1989) and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). She is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop and makes her home in Iowa City. A reviewer for the New York Times Book Review called Housekeeping "So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield." Another reviewer for the New York Times Book Review called Gilead "a beautiful work-demanding, grave and lucid ... Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction." MARY CLEARMAN BLEW
What was it like to be a teenager in Sandpoint, Idaho, in the 1950s? As I think of my own experience growing up in Lewistown, Montana, where it was distinctly declasse to be caught listening to country music or wearing cowboy boots, I wonder how Sandpoint teenagers in your day regarded the timber industry. Was there a
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MARY CLEARMAN BLEW