SOURCE: “Kaye Gibbons (1960-),” in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 156-68.

In the following essay, Mason provides an overview of Gibbons's life and career.

Kaye Gibbons has now published two more novels since she burst upon the public's awareness with her 1987 novel, Ellen Foster, to acclaim and awards. She has shown herself to be a skillful, imaginative, sensitive, and interesting novelist, who has taken the perseverance of the human spirit and Nash County, North Carolina, where she grew up, for her continuing literary domain, as she explores its people, ways, and past. Her work is bold and experimental, but easily accessible, winning for her a large body of readers. She is young, but already established, and not breaking stride as she continues to produce challenging and satisfying fiction at a steady pace.

Biography

The daughter of...