SOURCE: Rood, Karen L. “Understanding Annie Proulx.” In Understanding Annie Proulx, pp. 1-15. University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Rood provides an overview of Proulx's life, career, body of work, critical reception, and the salient themes and narrative style of her fiction.

Annie Proulx achieved renown as a fiction writer relatively late in life, when her first novel, Postcards (1992), earned her the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award. More honors followed for her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), which won a National Book Award for Fiction, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, and an Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1993, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. The novel became a best-seller, earning Proulx, at fifty-eight, a reputation as an important “new” fiction writer. Proulx, however, had been writing short fiction for magazines since the 1950s and had been supporting herself and her three sons...