Ann Beattie's powerful contrast in her writing of tellingly detailed descriptions and stark silence has caused her work to be placed in the contemporary canon of literary minimalism, a movement identified by critics--not by the so-called minimalists themselves--in the 1970s. This controversial term has been applied to the different fictions of Raymond Carver, Amy Hemple, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, and others. While some of these authors--especially Carver--remain inspirations whom Beattie admiringly acknowledges, her prolific and continually evolving work in the following decades defies categorization within any stylistic school.

Charlotte Ann Beattie was born 8 September 1947 in Washington, D.C., where she enjoyed a stable, suburban family life with her mother, Charlotte, a housewife, and her father, James, an administrator for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She was an artistic child, writing stories, drawing, and reading widely with the encouragement of her parents. Utterly uninspired...