Ann Beattie is a novelist and short-story writer whose evocations of American life at the end of the twentieth century have earned her a wide readership and sustained critical engagement for more than two decades. Beattie's fiction explores the emotional and social landscapes of white, middle-class America, focusing most often on members of the baby-boom generation, their coming of age in the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their efforts to build lives in the ruins of the nuclear family and the suburban idyll their parents' generation had embraced.

Charlotte Ann Beattie was born on 8 September 1947 in Washington, D.C., the only child of Charlotte Crosby and James A. Beattie, a grants-management specialist for the federal government. Beattie grew up in the suburbs of Washington and has described her childhood as "normal and middle-class," noteworthy only for her early interest in the arts and...