Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home and Lila are companions to Gilead and focus on the Boughton and Ames families during the same time period.[12][13]
Robinson is also the author of many nonfiction works, including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Reading Genesis was released on March 12, 2024. Her novels and nonfiction works have been translated into 36 languages.
In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[18] Robinson was selected by the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University to deliver the 2018 Hulsean Lectures on Christian theology. She was the fourth woman selected for the series which was established in 1790. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
The Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of writer and essayist Marilynne Robinson.
Honors and awardsedit
Robinson has received numerous literary, theological and academic honors, among them the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the 2013 Park Kyong-ni Prize, and the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2021, the Tulsa Library Trust presented her with the Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. Robinson's alma mater, the University of Washington, honored her with their 2022 Alumni Summa Laude Dignata Award.
Robinson has received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities and colleges, starting with Oxford University in 2010 and Brown University in 2012, and followed most recently by the University of Iowa, Yale University, Boston College, Cambridge University, and the University of Portland.
Commendationsedit
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists", adding that "Robinson's is a voice we urgently need to attend to in both Church and society here [in the UK]."[19]
On June 26, 2015, President Barack Obama quoted Robinson in his eulogy for Clementa C. Pinckney of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In speaking about "an open heart," Obama said: "[w]hat a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'" [20] In November 2015, The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between Obama and Robinson, covering topics in American history and the role of faith in society.[21][22]
Personal lifeedit
Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City.[23][24] Her Congregationalism and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin have been important in many of her novels, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister.[25] In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker."[26]
In 1967 she married Fred Miller Robinson,[27][28] a writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Robinsons divorced in 1989.[29] The couple had two sons. In the late 1970s, she wrote Housekeeping in the evenings while they slept. Robinson said they influenced her writing in many ways, since "[Motherhood] changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself."[30]
Robinson divides her time between northern California and upstate New York.
Bibliographyedit
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (February 2015)
^Werlock, Abby H. P. (22 April 2015). Encyclopedia of the American Novel. Infobase Learning. ISBN 9781438140698.
^"Hill & Wood Funeral Service | Charlottesville, VA Funeral Home & Cremation".
^This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. BRILL. 2015-09-25. ISBN 9789004302235.
^"History & Literature of the Pacific Northwest: Marilynne Robinson, 1943". Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington. n.d. Retrieved 2008-04-13.
^Fay, Interviewed by Sarah. "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
^"Marilynne Robinson". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
^Max, D. T. (2012-09-07). "D.F.W. Week: The Wonderfully Arrogant First Pitch Letter". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
^"American Academy of Arts & Sciences". Amacad.org. January 1999. Retrieved 2015-10-29.
^Williams, Rowan, "Mighty plea for reasonableness", Church Times, 12 August 2012
^"Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney". whitehouse.gov. 2015-06-26. Retrieved 2015-10-29 – via National Archives.
^Robinson, Marilynne; Obama, President Barack (November 5, 2015). "President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved August 21, 2016.
^Robinson, Marilynne; Obama, President Barack (November 19, 2015). "President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved August 21, 2016.
^"Marilynne Robinson interview: The faith behind the fiction", Reform, September 2010.
^Fay, Interviewed by Sarah (2008). "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review. Vol. Fall 2008, no. 186. ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
^Brockes, Emma (2009-05-29). "A life in writing: Marilynne Robinson". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-01-04.
^"Five books for 2014", The Economist November 21, 2013
^"Jack". US Macmillan. Retrieved September 15, 2020.
^"Marilynne Robinson Introduced by Paul Elie". 92 St Y.
^"PEN/Hemingway Award Winners". The Hemingway Society. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
^"1982 Finalists". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
^"The 2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2019-05-21.
^"2006- Marilynne Robinson". Grawemeyer.org. Archived from the original on 2014-04-04. Retrieved 2015-10-29.
^"Simmons among nine honorary degree recipients". Brown University. 16 May 2012. Retrieved 28 May 2014.
^President Obama to Award 2012 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Whitehouse.gov, retrieved 30 June 2013
^Julie Jackson (September 26, 2013). "Park Kyung-ni literary prize goes to Robinson". Korea Herald. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
^Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
^"Marilynne Robinson wins Library of Congress fiction prize". Associated Press. March 29, 2016. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
^Foundation, Dayton Literary Peace Prize. "Dayton Literary Peace Prize - Marilynne Robinson, 2016 Recipient of the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award". daytonliterarypeaceprize.org.
External linksedit
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