Smiley, Jane (1949-…), an American novelist and short-story writer, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991). Much of Smiley’s fiction deals with troubled relationships within families. She often sets her work in the Midwest.
In A Thousand Acres, Smiley portrays the disintegration of a farm family in Iowa. The central characters, a dominating elderly father and his three daughters, reflect the influence of William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. The story also shows Smiley’s feminist and environmental interests. Smiley similarly used Iowa as the setting of Some Luck (2014) and Early Warning and Golden Age (both 2015), the three novels in her “Last Hundred Years” trilogy. The trilogy is a chronicle of the Luck family, beginning in 1920 and concluding with events in 2019.
Smiley’s first novel was Barn Blind (1980), a story about a woman and her four teenage children living on a Midwestern ranch. At Paradise Gate (1981) is a novel about family tensions that emerge when three daughters return home to visit their mother and dying father. Duplicate Keys (1984) is a mystery novel. The Greenlanders (1988) is a family chronicle set in Greenland during the 1300’s. In Moo (1995), Smiley wrote a satire of academic life at a Midwestern agricultural college. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998) is a historical novel set in the United States during the mid-1800’s. Good Faith (2003) deals with a charming but dishonest real-estate salesman in rural New Jersey in the 1980’s. Ten Days in the Hills (2007) deals with a group of men and women who gather in a mansion in Los Angeles and spend 10 days discussing politics, motion pictures, and their personal lives. In the fanciful Perestroika in Paris (2020), a curious racehorse slips out of her stall in Paris and discovers a fascinating world, as well as new friends that include a dog, some birds, and a boy. A Dangerous Business (2022) is a mystery set in California in the 1850’s.
Smiley’s novels for young readers include The Georges and the Jewels (2009) and A Good Horse (2010), which are both set on a California horse ranch in the 1960’s. Smiley began a new series for young readers with Riding Lessons (2018). The series is set in the 1960’s and centers on a fourth-grade girl who loves riding and horses. Smiley also wrote the picture book Twenty Yawns (2016, illustrated by Lauren Castillo).
Smiley’s short fiction has been published in The Age of Grief (1987), Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989), and The Life of the Body (1990). She discusses her love of horses in the nonfiction book A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (2004). She analyzes the history and theory of the novel in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005).
Jane Graves Smiley was born on Sept. 26, 1949, in Los Angeles. She graduated from Vassar College in 1971 and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Iowa in 1978. Smiley taught English at Iowa State University from 1981 to 1990 and from 1992 to 1996.
