Robinson, Marilynne (1943-…), an American author, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel Gilead (2004). Gilead takes the form of a letter written by John Ames, a 76-year-old clergyman in a small Iowa town called Gilead, to his 7-year-old son. Ames surveys his life and that of his fiery abolitionist grandfather and pacifist father, both clergymen. He writes about his struggles with his feelings about his godson, Jack, the son of his best friend and fellow clergyman Robert Broughton. As a man of faith, Ames wrestles with the tragedies of life, the failings of men and women, and the discovery that religious experience may live most vividly in everyday moments of beauty and warm human interaction.
Robinson continued the stories of other characters introduced in Gilead in several other novels. Home (2008) tells the story of the family of Robert Broughton. Glory and Jack, two of his adult children, have returned home to Gilead and are trying to find a good life after many challenges and trials. Lila (2014) is about John Ames’s second wife, who came to Gilead seeking peace and stability in her life. Jack (2020) is a prequel to Gilead about the early days of the romance between Jack Broughton and Della Miles, an African American high school teacher, in St. Louis.
Robinson gained recognition with her first book, the novel Housekeeping (1980). The story is narrated by a young woman called Ruthie. After their mother commits suicide, the orphaned Ruthie and her younger sister, Lucille, live first with their grandmother and then with two great-aunts. Finally, an eccentric and free-spirited aunt named Sylvie comes to take care of them. Sylvie had previously lived as a wanderer. Lucille becomes alienated from Ruthie and from Sylvie and moves in with one of her teachers. After the townspeople try to remove Sylvie as Ruthie’s guardian, the two burn down their house, leave town, and become wanderers.
In addition to her novels, Robinson wrote several nonfiction works that made her a leading commentator on faith in modern life. Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution (1989) is Robinson’s attack on the United Kingdom for the environmental pollution caused by a nuclear plant that produces plutonium. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) explores such topics as American social history in the 1800’s, the British scientist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and misrepresentations of the Protestant religious leader John Calvin. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) defends religious and artistic understandings of human beings against a narrow and simplifying misapplication of science. Robinson also deals with such themes in the essays collected in When I Was a Girl I Read Books (2012), The Givenness of Things (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018).
Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on Nov. 26, 1943. She received a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington in 1977. Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1991 to 2016.
