From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American writer. She has written, or collaborated on, 13 books, most of which are novels, but including some poems, short stories and essays. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change," named after the bellwether. Kingsolver's books have been widely praised both for their passionate moral commitment and for their ethereal writing style.^[1] Every one of her books since Pigs in Heaven has been on The New York Times Best Seller list^[2]

Biography

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, spent some of her childhood in Africa where her father was a medical doctor, and grew up near Carlisle, Kentucky.^[3]

Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.

In the late 1970s, Kingsolver lived in a number of places, including Greece, France, and Tucson, Arizona, working variously as an archaeological digger, copy editor, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator. She earned a Master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Deciding after that to quit biology and become a writer, and not wanting to admit that to her thesis advisors, she told them that she had to care for an (imaginary) injured relative.^[4] She then took a job as a science writer for the university. The science writing led to some freelance feature writing and journalism. In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.

Her subsequent books were Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (non-fiction); 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); the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002) Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, prose poetry with the photographs of Annie Griffiths Belt; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), a description of eating locally. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Kingsolver was awarded the National Humanities Medal by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 1994, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University. In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered the commencement address, entitled "How to be Hopeful".^[5]

She is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band consisting of published writers, including Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry, and Stephen King among others.

Barbara Kingsolver lives on a farm in Emory, Virginia with her husband Steven Hopp, their daughter Lily, and her daughter Camille from a previous marriage.

Literary themes

Community, economic injustice and cultural difference inform the themes of Kingsolver's work.

In The Bean Trees, the main character acquires a child named Turtle and meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants whose daughter was taken by the government in an effort to force them to speak out about their underground teaching circle. They were forced to escape torture and death in their home country, but are also forced to evade the authorities in the United States. The sequel to The Bean Trees, her 1993 novel Pigs in Heaven, examines the conflicts between individual and community rights, through a story about a Cherokee child adopted out of her tribe. In Animal Dreams, the American sister of the main protagonist is kidnapped by US-backed Contras while working to promote sustainable farming in Nicaragua. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver examined the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Kingsolver has said, "If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."^[3]

Works

• The Bean Trees, 1988, 1st UK edition 1989, Limited edition (200) 1992
• Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, 1989
• Homeland and Other Stories, 1989
• Animal Dreams, 1990
• Another America, 1992
• Pigs in Heaven, 1993
• High Tide in Tucson, 1995, also: Limited edition (150)1995
• The Poisonwood Bible, 1998
• Prodigal Summer, 2000
• Small Wonder: Essays, 2002
• Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, 2002 (with photographer Annie Griffiths Belt)
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle 2007, (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver)
• The Lacuna, 2009

References

External links

• Author page on HarperCollins
• The Patience of a Saint. National Geographic, 2000.
• 1994 Commencement Address at DePauw University - MP3
• Transcript of Interview with Living on Earth, May 4th, 2007. Also available in MP3.
• Official page of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"
• Wbqonline.com October 2009

From Wikiquote

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".

Sourced

• I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.
  • The Bean Trees (1988)

• At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
  • Codi Noline, Animal Dreams (1990)

• He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless.... I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.
  • Codi Noline, Animal Dreams

• Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
  • Hallie Noline, Animal Dreams

• Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
  • Animal Dreams

• It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
  • Emelina, Animal Dreams

• A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
  • The Poisonwood Bible (1998)

• Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
  • Prodigal Summer (2000)

• We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
  • Mammals

Unsourced

• Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

• Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

• I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

• If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

• It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

• It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

• Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

• Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

• Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

• People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

• Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

• Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

• The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

• The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

• The truth needs so little rehearsal.

• The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

• There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

• Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

• What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

• What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

• Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

External links

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Barbara Kingsolver