Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, India on July 27, 1940. Her father was a renowned chemist with connections around the globe. She and her two sisters were educated in India, England and Switzerland. At the age of three she spoke English along with her native Bengali. Mukherjee received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and an M.A. in English and ancient Indian culture from the University of Baroda in 1961. She received her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1963 and 1969 respectively. In 1964 she married Clark Blaise, a fellow writer in the Iowa Writers Workshop. The "culture shock" of the midwest, not to mention America in general, profoundly affected Mukherjee; many of her works, like Jasmine (1989) and The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), dramatize the uniqueness of the immigrant's struggle in the "heartland."

Mukherjee's academic resume is...