Smiley’s intimate evocations of American life have been compared to John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy Updike himself praised Smiley for working on what he called “the edge of acceptable novel writing,” where she had replaced “plot and suspense with something freer and more lifelike-casual talk, generally inconsequential but creating a lattice of cross-purpose in which emotions and attractions extend their tendrils.” Her most recent novels make up the Last Hundred Years trilogy, a year-by-year, multigenerational account of a Midwestern family between 19. In 1992, Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, a modern-dress King Lear set in Iowa farm country. Smiley is equally prolific on the page: since 1980 she has published two story collections and fourteen novels, including a murder mystery, a medieval epic, a college satire, a nineteenth-century picaresque, and reworkings of Shakespeare and Boccaccio. ” before launching into a story within a story, a pattern that continued as she made scones, cooked dinner, fed her horses, and drove.

One anecdote led to another, and she frequently interrupted herself to ask, “Did I tell you about. During the two afternoons I spent interviewing her, I heard about how her great-grandmother, a Norwegian immigrant, met her husband while going door-to-door as a dressmaker in Saint Paul, Minnesota how her grandfather nearly froze to death during a blizzard on an Idaho ranch how her grandmother lost the diamond ring her husband had won in a poker game.

Jane Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, in a family of storytellers-and it shows. Interviewed by Nicole Rudick Issue 214, Fall 2015

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