E. Annie Proulx (born 1935) won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Postcards and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her next novel, The Shipping News.

While she was certainly not an overnight sensation, having written stories from the age of ten and published short fiction since her early 20s, E. Annie Proulx did present her own remarkable success story, one characterized by hard work and a fierce independence. The measure of her success was impressive; with her first attempt at long-form fiction, Proulx won the respected PEN/Faulkner Award and the accolades of critics and fellow authors. David Bradley, writing for the New York Times, dubbed Postcards an example of "The Great American Novel." This acclaim snowballed with the publication of The Shipping News, which garnered three major prizes for Proulx and brought comparisons to legendary authors William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and Herman Melville. There was an overwhelmingly...