Jane Smiley

Smiley grew up in St. Louis and earned a doctorate in medieval literature at Iowa, then spent fifteen years teaching creative writing at Iowa State University while raising three children and studying the region's farmland closely enough to build A Thousand Acres on its exact agricultural detail.

That novel, transplanting King Lear onto a modern Iowa farm and centering the daughters' long-buried grievances, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and became a bestselling film. She has since written across an unusually wide range of genres, from horse-racing novels to a millennium-spanning historical trilogy.

An outspoken essayist on American fiction and politics, she has continued to publish steadily into her seventies.