Smiley was also influenced by Pearl Buck’s 1931 opus The Good Earth, which is set in Chinese farmland, and follows a family across multiple generations. Almost every major character in the novel has a direct counterpart in King Lear where Shakespeare tells the story of an elderly king who divides up his kingdom between three daughters, one of whom refuses the gift, Smiley tells the story of a powerful farmer who divides up his land between three daughters, one of whom refuses to accept. She resides in California.Ī Thousand Acres is designed as a modernization of William Shakespeare’s 1606 play King Lear, sometimes called the greatest play (or even the greatest work of literature) ever written.

Since 1991, Smiley has published 11 novels, four nonfiction books, and five children’s books. This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, two of the three most prestigious prizes for fiction offered to American novelists (the third is the National Book Award, for which Smiley has been nominated on several occasions).

Smiley’s greatest critical and commercial success was A Thousand Acres, published in 1991. The same was the case for Smiley’s next three novels, At Paradise Gate (1991), Duplicate Keys (1984), and The Greenlanders (1988). Smiley had begun working on the novel while she was an MFA student at Iowa it was a critical success, but not a commercial one. Smiley published her first novel, Blind Barn, in 1980, when she was 31 years old. in 1978, all from the University of Iowa, arguably the most prestigious school for creative writing in the United States. Smiley spent the rest of the decade obtaining a number of degrees in literature and creative writing: an M.A. She studied English literature at Vassar College, and graduated with a B.A. Hardcover (February 27th, 2018): $32.Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Missouri.Profoundly American.” - The Boston Globe Product Details A story bound and tethered to a lonely road in the Midwest, but drawn from a universal source. A Thousand Acres the prismatic quality of the greatest art.” - Chicago Tribune “It has been a long time since a novel so surprised me with its power to haunt. There seems to be nothing Smiley can’t write about fabulously well.” - San Francisco Chronicle “Powerful and poignant.” - The New York Times Book Review

The book has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.” - The Washington Post Book World

“A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart. A thrilling work of art.” - Chicago Sun-Times

A thousand acres novel