![]() One of Marilynne Robinson’s primary influences in the composition of Housekeeping seems to be Henry David Thoreau. She lectures regularly around the country, and is rumored to be at work on a fourth installment in the Gilead saga. She received a 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, and currently lives in Iowa City, where she is Professor Emeritus and a former faculty member at the distinguished Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2005, Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Robinson wrote two follow-up novels, which follow the characters from Gilead over the course of the next ten years. After the publication of Housekeeping, Robinson turned to nonfiction and completed several books of critical work-she would not release her next novel, Gilead, for over twenty years. She penned Housekeeping in the late 1970s, and though she expected it to receive little attention, it became an object of national acclaim and the winner of the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. After studying American Literature at Pembroke College (the former women’s college at Brown University), she went on to earn a doctorate in English from the University of Washington, where she wrote her dissertation on Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. She was close with her brother, who also grew up to become a writer and an art historian. ![]() Marilynne Robinson was born Marilynne Summers in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1943. ![]()
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