SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil. “E. Annie Proulx: An American Odyssey.” Publishers Weekly (3 June 1996): 57–58.

In the following essay, Steinberg provides an overview of Proulx's life, career, and body of work upon the publication of Accordion Crimes.

Mention E. Annie Proulx's name and readers flash an instant visual map of where she can be found.

Those who shivered through Newfoundland's stark climate in The Shipping News are certain that she lives there. Yet the landscape of failing farms and dilapidated trailers in Heart Songs and Postcards prove that rural New England is essential to her frame of reference. (Indeed, she lived in Vermont for over a decade.) Postcards, however, also plunged across the map of America, as does her eagerly awaited new novel, Accordion Crimes, just out from Scribner. In this latest work, the whole country serves as her canvas, a chiaroscuro mural of ethnic enclaves that includes urban ghettos, prairie...