Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- The Writing Process
- Character Development
- The Life of a Novelist
Other Areas of Expertise
- Children's Literature
- Humor
- Literature and Fiction
More Information
Jane Smiley
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Essayist
Base: Carmel Valley, CA
- Photo: Elena Seibert
Jane Smiley has been praised as ''a diverse and masterly writer'' (The New York Times Book Review) and ''one of the premier novelists of her generation, possessed of a mastery of the craft and an uncompromising vision that grows more powerful with each book'' (The Washington Post).
She has written about politics, horse training, sex, Hollywood, farming, literature, marriage, Barbie, and the list goes on. It's no wonder Time magazine once asked the question ''Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?''
During her more than twenty years as a writer, two of Jane Smiley's novels have been made into movies: A Thousand Acres, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and The Age of Grief, which was developed into The Secret Lives of Dentists.
The recipient of an MFA and a PhD, Jane Smiley is the author of twelve novels, as well as many essays for such magazines as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and others.
Works by this Speaker
Private Life
A riveting new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winner that traverses the intimate landscape of one woman’s life, from the 1880s to World War II.
Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven in post–Civil War Missouri when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He’s the most famous man their small town has ever produced: a naval officer and a brilliant astronomer—a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret’s mother calls the match “a piece of luck.”
Margaret is a good girl who has been raised to marry, yet Andrew confounds her expectations from the moment their train leaves for his naval base in faraway California. Soon she comes to understand that his devotion to science leaves precious little room for anything, or anyone, else. When personal tragedies strike and when national crises envelop the country, Margaret stands by her husband. But as World War II approaches, Andrew’s obsessions take a different, darker turn, and Margaret is forced to reconsider the life she has so carefully constructed.
Private Life is a beautiful evocation of a woman’s inner world: of the little girl within the hopeful bride, of the young woman filled with yearning, and of the faithful wife who comes to harbor a dangerous secret. But it is also a heartbreaking portrait of marriage and the mysteries that endure even in lives lived side by side; a wondrously evocative historical panorama; and, above all, a masterly, unforgettable novel from one of our finest storytellers.
The Georges and the Jewels
A Pulitzer Prize winner makes her debut for young readers.
Jane Smiley makes her debut for young readers in this stirring novel set on a California horse ranch in the 1960s. Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt has always been more at ease with horses than with people. Her father insists they call all the mares “Jewel” and all the geldings “George” and warns Abby not to get attached: the horses are there to be sold. But with all the stress at school (the Big Four have turned against Abby and her friends) and home (her brother Danny is gone—for good, it seems—and now Daddy won’t speak his name), Abby seeks refuge with the Georges and the Jewels. But there’s one gelding on her family’s farm that gives her no end of trouble: the horse who won’t meet her gaze, the horse who bucks her right off every chance he gets, the horse her father makes her ride and train, every day. She calls him the Ornery George.
Ten Days in the Hills
In the aftermath of the 2003 Academy Awards, Max and Elena- he's an Oscar-winning writer/director-open their Holywood Hills home to a group of friends and neighbors, industy insiders and hangers-on, eager to escape the outside world and dissect the latest news, gossip, and secrets of the business. Over the next ten days, old lovers collide, new relationships form, and sparks fly, all with Smiley's signature sparkling wit and characterization.
With its breathtaking passion and sexy irreverence, Ten Days in the Hills is a glowing addition to the work of one of our most beloved novelists.
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling novelist Jane Smiley celebrates the novel–and takes us on an exhilarating tour through one hundred of them–in this seductive and immensely rewarding literary tribute.
In her inimitable style–exuberant, candid, opinionated–Smiley explores the power of the novel, looking at its history and variety, its cultural impact, and just how it works its magic. She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels–from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro–she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.
A Year at the Races
“Every horse story is a love story,” writes Jane Smiley, who has loved horses for most of her life and owned and bred them for a good part of it. To love something is to observe it with more than usual attention, and that is precisely what Smiley does in this irresistibly smart, witty, and engaging chronicle of her obsession.
In particular she follows a sexy filly named Waterwheel and a grey named Wowie (he “tells” a horse communicator that he wants it changed from Hornblower) as they begin careers at the racetrack. Filled with humor and suspense, and with discourses on equine intelligence, affection, and character, A Year at the Races is a winner.
Good Faith
Greed. Envy. Sex. Property. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American obsessions with the expertise of a master carpenter.
Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it’s 1982, and even in Joe’s small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends—and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it. Add to this Joe’s roller coaster affair with his mentor’s married daughter. The result is as suspenseful and entertaining as any of Jane Smiley’s fiction.
Horse Heaven
''It's not true,'' says a character in Jane Smiley's funny, passionate, and brilliant novel of horse racing, ''that anything can happen at the racetrack, '' but many astonishing and affecting things do—and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery, folly, greed, and derring-do.
The strange, compelling, sparkling, and mysterious universe of horse racing that has fascinated generations of punters and robber barons, horse lovers and wits, has never before been depicted with such verve and originality, such tenderness, such clarity, and, above all, such sheer exuberance.
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Jane Smiley joins the club of noted authors with novels set in the nineteenth-century United States, such as Thomas Pynchon with Mason & Dixon and Russell Banks with Cloudsplitter, a story about the radical abolitionist John Brown. Stylistically less extreme than Pynchon's novel, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton offers a taste of nineteenth-century writing without being off-putting. Its strong-willed heroine, and the triumphs and tragedies of the first twenty years of her life, will win the hearts of readers as she struggles to define her own morality and to sift some sense of victory out of ashes.
Moo
Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture. Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz. In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life.
A Thousand Acres
A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.
The Greenlanders
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas.
Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most farflung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders is the story of one family–proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Jane Smiley takes us into this world of farmers, priests, and lawspeakers, of hunts and feasts and long-standing feuds, and by an act of literary magic, makes a remote time, place, and people not only real but dear to us.
The Age of Grief
The luminous novella and stories in The Age of Grief explore the vicissitudes of love, friendship, and marriage with all the compassion and insight that have come to be expected from Jane Smiley.
Duplicate Keys
Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on the companionship and camaraderie of tightly knit circle of friends. At the center of this circle is a rock band struggling to navigate New York’s erratic music scene, and an apartment/practice space with approximately fifty key-holders. One sunny day, Alice enters the apartment and finds two of the band members shot dead. As the double-murder sends waves of shock through their lives, this group of friends begins to unravel, and dangerous secrets are revealed one by one. When Alice begins to notice things amiss in her own apartment, the tension breaks out as it occurs to her that she is not the only person with a key, and she may not get a chance to change the locks.
Jane Smiley applies her distinctive rendering of time, place, and the enigmatic intricacies of personal relationships to the twists and turns of suspense. The result is a brilliant literary thriller that will keep readers guessing up to its final, shocking conclusion.
