“At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute…”
Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is a modern reimagining William Shakespeare’s King Lear, but instead of taking place in ancient Britain, the story is set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s. This is the era of economic inflation, the oil crisis, and President Jimmy Carter, as well as the introduction of new farming practices, such as bigger machinery and unknowing topsoil destruction, both of which play an important role in the novel. Indeed, ecology serves as a key background theme in A Thousand Acres, in some ways the novel might be interpreted as a withering critique of Iowa farming practices.
A Thousand Acres depicts a version of King Lear in which the story is told from the perspective of the two elder daughters who receive their inheritance and promptly abandon their aging senile father out in the cold (click here if you are interested in reading my reflections on King Lear). However, Smiley’s novel forces us to ask: what if Goneril and Regan were actually the sympathetic characters in the play? The book is told from the first-person perspective of Virginia “Ginny” Cook Smith (Goneril in King Lear). She is in her late ‘30s, married to an orderly man named Tyler “Ty” Smith, and has no children despite numerous attempts (she has suffered no less than five miscarriages, the latter two of which she has kept a secret from her husband). Her sister is Rose (Regan in King Lear), an eternally confident, strong-willed woman in her mid-thirties who has been diagnosed with breast cancer (she undergoes a mastectomy). She is married to a drinker named Pete Lewis (a former musician who was abusive toward Rose in the past). They have two daughters together: Pammy and Linda who have both been sent away to boarding school. Ginny and Rose have a murky relationship filled with sisterly secrets and mutual resentments. For example, for a long time Ginny resented Rose for having two daughters, while she struggled mightily with fertility. Of the two sisters, Ginny comes across as more of a peacemaker (however, it should be noted that Ginny is the narrator, and thus we have to question her reliability and portrayal of herself).
Ginny and Rose have one younger sister, Caroline (Cordelia in King Lear), who has decided to abandon the family farm and pursue a career as an attorney. In the novel, Caroline suddenly marries an attorney named Frank Rasmussen without informing anyone of the wedding. Ginny and Rose both resent their younger sister for her freedom and the fact that she is their father’s favorite, though their reasons are later explicated in the novel. The Cook family farm is a handsome stretch of a thousand acres (thanks some complex legal wrangling with the neighbors). It spreads out from the T intersection of County Road 686 and Cabot Street Road, a long flat stretch of farmland under the domed sky in a fictional part of Iowa called Zebulon County (though Mason City is mentioned in the novel, a real Iowa town in Cerro Gordo County). It is “a whole section paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.” For a little historical flair, Ginny tells us all about her grandmother’s parents who emigrated from the hill country in west England just to settle in Zebulon County in 1890. She is careful to note that back then, the land was lush and marshy but now it has changed considerably.
Of course, the central figure in this whole farming business is the cold, austere, widower and family patriarch, Laurence “Larry” Cook. He is tough and well-respected in the community, particularly for his ability to amass such a large farm, but he is also calloused and pig-headed. His prideful characterization in the novel might well resonate with any number of archetypes of American masculinity many of us have encountered in the real world – men of few words, who get dirty and drive trucks; men who think of themselves as cowboys and ranchers, heroic and vain, lone wolves fighting back against a sea of worldly corruption; they are often conservative and religious, they praise the Jeffersonian ideal, they have minimal education, are contemptuous of intellectualism, they are incurious, and are proud of their own ignorance while satisfied with mere commonsense; they are the very same caricature of people we are constantly told are the “real Americans” in the United States, whose opinions always seem to hold more weight in the public consciousness, unlike the soft ivory tower “elites.” But as shown in A Thousand Acres, men like Larry Cook are hardly the figures we should be looking to for moral clarity in American society.
One day in May 1979, a neighboring farmer named Harold Clark (a log-time rival of Larry) hosts a celebratory pig roast to honor the return home of his son, Jess Clark, a draft-dodger has been bouncing around places like Seattle and Vancouver for thirteen years where he has learned all manner of strange things like organic farming and sunrise meditation. Needless to say, the arrival of Jess causes quite a stir. He is worldly and carefree, in contrast to the old obstinate men like Harold and Larry. However, at the party, perhaps in a fit of the drunken reverie, Larry abruptly announces that he will be dividing up the farm between his three daughters: he says the farm will be deeded and held in a joint corporation between the three of them. But why does he do this? Apparently, his main priority is to avoid inheritance taxes.
“My father said, ‘That’s the plan.’
I said, ‘What’s the plan, Daddy?’
He glanced at me, then at Caroline, and, looking at her all the while, he said, ‘We’re going to form this corporation, Ginny, and you girls are all going to have shares, then we’re going to build this new Slurrystone, and maybe a Harvestore, too, and enlarge the hog operation.’ He looked at me ‘You girls and Ty and Pete and Frank are going to run the show. You’ll each have a third part in the corporation. What do you think?’ (18-19).
Interestingly, Larry offers no “love test” for his daughters as is the case in the play King Lear, however like Cordelia, his youngest daughter Caroline expresses some mild reservations about the idea. Yet even when she tries be more conciliatory later to her father, Larry simply responds coldly, slamming the door in her face, and cutting her out of the corporation. This sets in motion a horrid string of events that spin wildly out of control.
After a lengthy section of the novel that was admittedly a slog for me to get through, the situation unsurprisingly goes sour between Ginny, Rose, and their father. No longer running the farm, Larry starts acting erratically, drinking and driving, wandering off in the night, stealing Pete’s truck, buying expensive things like $1,000 cabinets and so on. His daughters begin to wonder if he has Alzheimer’s, but no one has the power to control him. One night, Larry wrecks his truck and is sent to the hospital. After this, he stops speaking to his daughters, merely commenting on his own purposeless saying, “I got nothing.” He then runs out on his daughters during a rainstorm after a heated argument. But very quickly, the surrounding Iowan community sympathizes with the elder Larry. They see him as a shrewd businessman and successful farmer who decided to magnanimously hand over his life’s work to his two ungrateful daughters who then promptly cast him out –or so it would seem. Larry publicly denounces his two daughters as “whores” and “bitches” before turning to live with his favorite daughter Caroline.
During these chapters, Ginny’s character grows considerably. She suddenly abandons her simple disposition as the mediator in the family, and she allows herself to act more impulsively. She pursues her secret infatuation for handsome Jess Clark when he expresses interest in her. Jess’s presence on the farm makes her feel aroused (she has a dream of being a “sow” and a rare scene of satisfying sex with her husband Ty) before being seduced by Jess in a truck at the dump. She quickly falls in love with Jess while her marriage continues to grow loveless and distant. Jess tells her all about his travels, his struggles with his mother who died of cancer, and the horrors he faced at training camp which is why he decided to flee as a draft-dodger instead of serve in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Larry and Caroline file a lawsuit against Ginny and Rose to regain control of the farm, but it ultimately fails.
Around this point in the novel, in a dramatically revealing moment (one of many such moments in the latter half of the book), Rose shares the real reason for her contempt for her father. She asks, “‘Ginny, you don’t remember how he came after us, do you?’” (188). Rose recalls how, after their mother died, Larry placed the two girls in separate rooms and repeatedly beat and raped them as young teenagers. He was a violent, atrocious father. This is why Rose decided to send her two daughters away to boarding school; as a precaution against their father. And it’s also why Rose and Ginny sought to shield Caroline for much of her childhood.
“‘Well, I was afraid he’d try something with Caroline, and she was only eight or ten. But I was flattered, too. I thought that he’d picked me, me, to be his favorite, not you, not her. On the surface, I thought it was okay, that it must be okay if he said it was, since he was the rule maker. He didn’t rape me, Ginny. He seduced me. He said it was okay, that it was good to please him, that he needed it, that I was special. He said he loved me’” (190).
At first Ginny is shocked by this revelation, she does not remember much from her childhood, and she refuses to accept it, but it all turns out to be a survivor’s way of dealing with serious trauma. Later when she is preparing Jess’s bed, she has a sudden horrifying flashback. She has a grotesque memory lying beside her father in her bed all those years ago. She screams aloud, with a deafening howl, and suddenly things start to make sense for her –it explains her timidity around her father, her self-consciousness about her body, her clinical approach to having sex, and so on. The effects of years of repression now come to the fore and she worries that the “radioactive waste” of her dark memories will “mutate or even wipe everything else” in her mind. In my view, the notion that Ginny somehow forgot about all the years of abuse, and that it was never mentioned by Rose in all the years of living together on the farm, is a bit of an all-too-convenient narrative device, though to be fair the human brain does respond to trauma in unique ways and psychologists have apparently confirmed that Jane Smiley captured this phenomenon accurately.
Anyway, more shocking twists come when Rose’s husband Pete drinks too much and drowns himself in the quarry after driving his truck into the water, and Rose reveals she has been sleeping with Jess. In fact, she is in love with Jess. Naturally, this stirs up Ginny’s jealousy and she tries to poison her sister through a collection of canned sausages. Then after a bitter feud with her husband, Ginny decides she can no longer take living on the family farm. She takes a wad of money ($1,000) and just drives away, far off to St. Paul where she finds work as a waitress and rents a cheap apartment. For a time, it seems like her life has finally found a measure of peace. She calls this her “afterlife” as she reads books from the local library and makes acquaintances at the restaurant. But soon she starts receiving updates from the farm –her father had a heart attack and died, and Jess has left Rose to head back to Vancouver.
Years pass and Ty manages to track down Ginny. He has decided to give up his portion of the farm to Rose and move back to Texas. The situation is not looking good, so he asks for a divorce from Ginny which she nonchalantly accepts. Ginny then travels back to Iowa where Rose has been hospitalized for advancing cancer. As it turns out, Rose never ate the poisoned sausages and completely forgot about them. Ginny and Rose make-up with one another as Rose grants Ginny custody of her two daughters; she also decides to bequeath the farm to Ginny and Caroline so they can sell it. On her hospital deathbed, Rose reminds Ginny that throughout her life, she sought retribution but never really got it. Their father was senile and forgetful; he never truly had to confront the reality of his sexual abuse, and all the while the Iowan community venerated him as a martyr, while castigating his daughters as ungrateful. But the one thing Rose can praise herself for is that she didn’t forgive the unforgivable, she never let go of her anger, she calls it her sole accomplishment in life.
When Rose dies, Ginny adopts Rose’s two daughters (she finally able to become a mother). And in a brief epilogue, Ginny and Caroline clean things out of the farm for the sale, and Ginny very nearly tells Caroline about their father’s sexual abuse, but she is stopped short of giving a full explanation. Ginny decides to dump the old jars of poisoned sausages down the drain and into the disposal, though like her sister Rose, she never truly lets go of her anger.
A Thousand Acres is a dark, weighty novel about a rural farming family whose world is filled with unspoken secrets and a lifetime of repression. This is a dramatic family soap opera that left me in a state of exasperation and revulsion by the end. A Thousand Acres felt a shade exploitative to me, as if Jane Smiley had sought to unveil ever more titillating and shocking twists every few chapters –incest, rape, murder, infidelity, lies, secrecy and so on. It all becomes a bit too outrageous for me and only tenuously believable by the end. But still, her efforts to humanize the characters of Goneril and Regan in King Lear, and thereby make them more sympathetic, remains an intriguing premise –even if the key plot-point about sexual abuse is nowhere to be found in Shakespeare’s original play. However, as Smiley notes in a wonderful December 2023 interview she gave to LitHub: “Shakespeare rewrote a lot of previous material, so when I was looking up the previous material that he used to write King Lear, there was some suggestion that the king had violated his daughters, which was not uncommon in those days. And so I thought that would be an interesting and believable motive for the way that Ginny and Rose feel about their father.” The full interview comes recommended from me, it was primarily focused on recent efforts by the political right in America to ban A Thousand Acres from high school libraries.
At any rate, upon finishing A Thousand Acres, I noticed two key aspects that seem to loom large over the backdrop to the novel: the first is Larry’s late wife Ann and the other is the farm’s unhealthy well water. With respect to Ann, her ghostly presence lingers forever in Ginny’s mind. Ann died when Ginny was a mere teenager, and it was only then that the sexual abuse from her father began. Throughout the novel, Ginny frequently ponders what her mother might have said in this or that situation, and how her presence might have shaped the way Ginny sees her father: “My mother died before she could present him [Larry] to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope” (20). Had Ginny’s mother survived, life on the farm might have turned out differently. In the play King Lear, the king is a widower and we know almost nothing about his late wife, though her matriarchal absence is surely felt. With respect to the farm’s well water, this issue seems to resurface again and again in the novel. Many characters succumb to cancer, from Jess’s mother to Ginny’s sister Rose, and it can be argued their health problems are linked to the farm’s well water. Jess even claims that the water might be causing all of Ginny’s miscarriages. Thus, there is, perhaps, both a literal and metaphorical poisoning of the well in A Thousand Acres as one family’s legacy is both ecologically poisoned leading to the ruination of the land and there is also a poisoning of the family’s moral cohesion.
Notable Quotations
“At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road” (opening line).
“Linda was born just when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies, whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system. I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly speak, and I wasn’t very nice to Rose, since some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily (it had taken me three years to get pregnant –she had gotten pregnant after six months of getting married)… I had a hint again, again, for the first time since Linda was born, of how it was in those families, how generations of silence could flow from a single choice” (8-9).
“People in Zebulon County saw friendliness as a moral virtue” (10).
“Well, I’ve thought over every moment of that party time and time again, sifting for pointers, signals, ways of knowing how to do things differently from the way they got done. There were no clues” (13).
“I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil, the way it travels from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick is everything it does, endlessly working and flowing , a river sometimes, a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, except for the tile lines. Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic. The Davises did find a shimmering sheet punctuated by cattails and sweet flag. The grass is gone, now, and the marches, ‘the big wet prairie,’ but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it” (16).
“Perhaps there is a distance that is optimum distance for seeing one’s father, father than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape –the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk” (20).
“The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn’t begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn, it was the same calm and safe vista that was mine every night –the one that I sometimes admitted to myself I’d been afraid to leave when high school was over and the question of doing something else came up. It suited me, and it was easy to let it claim me every night, but I had wishes, too, secret, passionate wishes, and as I sat there enjoying the heavy, moist breeze, I let myself think, maybe this is it, maybe this is what turns the tide, and carries the darling child into shore” (27).
“We might as well have had a catechism:
What is a farmer?
A farmer is a man who feeds the world
What is a farmer’s first duty?
To grow more food.
What is a farmer’s second duty?
To buy more land.
What are the signs of a good farm?
Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water” (45).
“There was a way in which I could look at my life as an unending battle to make friends…” (86).
“Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts there were to have faced. Your own endurance might be. A pleasant fiction allowed by others who’ve really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind” (90).
“I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self” (93).
“I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the back door and back down the road. The whole way I was conscious of my body –graceless and hurrying, unfit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable” (114-115).
“On a farm, no matter how careful you are about taking off boots and overalls, the dirt just drifts through anyway. Dirt is the least of it. There’s oil and blood and muck, too” (120).
“‘How can you treat your father like this? I flattered you wen I called you a bitch! What do you want to reduce me to? I’ll stop this building! I’ll get the land back! I’ll throw you whores off this place. You’ll learn what it means to treat your father like this. I curse you! You’ll never have children, Ginny, you haven’t got a hope. And your children are going to laugh when you die!’” (183).
“‘Ginny, you don’t remember how he came after us, do you?’” (188).
“Most issues on a farm return to the issue of keeping up appearances” (199).
“Desire, shame, and fear. A freak like a woman with three legs…” (262).
“I have often thought the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation” (292).
“One thing was surely true about going to court. It had marvelously divided us from each other and from our old lives. There could be no reconciliation now” (326).
“And when I remember that world, I remember my dead young self, who left me something, too, which is her canning jar of poisoned sausage and the ability it confers, of remembering what can’t imagine. I can’t say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably never chose never to remember –the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others” (370-371, closing lines).
The 1992 Pulitzer Prize Decision
Of the three members of the 1992 Fiction Jury, two were prior Pulitzer Prize winners, one in the Fiction category, the other in the Criticism category.
- Chair: Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
- Gail Caldwell (1951-present): was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas and attended Texas Tech University before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained two degrees in American studies. She was an instructor at the University of Texas until 1981 and taught feature writing at Boston University before working as the arts editor of the Boston Review and wrote for other publications like the New England Monthly and the Village Voice. However, she was primarily renowned for her many years serving as the chief book critic for The Boston Globe (1985-2009). Caldwell would later win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She served several times on the fiction jury for the Pulitzer Prize; serving as chair of the jury in both 1995 and 1997. As of the time I am writing this review, she apparently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has written three memoirs: A Strong West Wind (2006), Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), and New Life, No Instructions (2014). She has been open about her childhood bout of polio and her struggles with alcoholism.
- James A. McPherson (1943-2016): was the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1978 for his short story collection Elbow Room. Click here for my brief biography of James Alan McPherson.
Frank McConnell’s jury report was submitted to Bud Kliment (assistant administrator of the prizes) on December 11, 1991. However, McConnell was forced to hold it back for a few days, cutting it close to the end of year deadline in order to allow one of the jurors to include an additional novel for consideration. In the jury report, McConnell alphabetically listed the three nominees for the prize: Mao II by Don DeLillo, Jernigan by David Gates, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. He wrote that these nominees represent a “splendid spectrum of American fiction” but he also shared the additional nominee, Robert Persig’s Lila: An Inquiry into Morals which was included at the last minute by the “third member of our jury [James A. McPherson], who had severe reservations about the other books chosen.” McConnell also attached a brief one-page defense of the book written by James McPherson. I have to wonder if McPherson had a personal connection to Robert Persig, or if he truly felt Lila was worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. We may never really know.
Additionally, in 1992 the Pulitzer Prize issued a special award to Maus by Art Spiegelman, a postmodern graphic novel based on interviews Spiegelman conducted with his father, Vladek, about his life as a Polish Jew and a holocaust survivor. Maus has often been regarded as one of the most important graphic novels to emerge out of the late ‘80s, along with super hero comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. However, there was a great difficulty in accurately categorizing Maus at the time – was it a work of fiction? Biography? Art? It’s unique blending of genres is what apparently led the Pulitzer Prize to simply award it one of its rare special awards. Unlike with other special Pulitzer awards, the record for this one simply states “For Maus.”
Who is Jane Smiley?
Jane Smiley (1949-present) was born in Los Angeles, California and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St Louis. Her family has been described as a family of story-tellers, from her Norwegian great-grandmother to her own mother who was a writer for The Globe-Democrat. Smiley graduated with an AB degree in literature at Vassar College (1971), then an MA (1975), MFA (1976), and PhD (1978) from the University of Iowa where she spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught creative writing at Iowa State University. In 1996, she relocated to California and later started teaching creative writing at UC Riverside in 2015.
Smiley published her first novel Barn Blind (1980), which was followed by a mystery novel Duplicate Keys (1984), and a work of historical fiction set in the 14th century entitled The Greenlanders (1988) which has been praised by many as an under-appreciated work, including by Jonathan Franzen. She won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story “Lily”, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly before her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres was published in 1991 (it was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1997 and an opera in 2022, debuting at the Des Moines Metro Opera). A Thousand Acres also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her subsequent books were Moo (1995), an agricultural satire of midwest academia; Horse Heaven (2000), which is about horse racing (Smiley is an equestrian enthusiast); Ten Days in the Hills (2007), reportedly a reimagining of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron set in Hollywood; Private Life (2010), which examines a woman’s marriage and life; Some Luck (2014), which covers the history of a farming family called the Langdons; it was the first entry in a trilogy and was followed by Early Warning (2015) and Golden Age (2015); Perestroika in Paris (2020), which is a light-hearted story about a racehorse in Paris; A Dangerous Business (2022) which is a mystery set during the California Gold Rush; and most recently Lucky (2024), which is about a folk musician.
A couple of her books have been made into films, including A Thousand Acres and her novella The Age of Grief, which was made into the 2002 film entitled The Secret Lives of Dentists. She also published “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel” (2005), a personal non-fiction reflection on the history and the nature of the novel, which has sometimes been compared to E. M. Forster’s classic Aspects of the Novel (1927), as well as a memoir on horse-racing entitled A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. In 2006, Smiley won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and she chaired the judges’ panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009. She has regularly contributed to New York Times Book Review.
As far as I can tell, Jane Smiley has reportedly been married four times, she has three daughters, and resides on a horse ranch in the Carmel Valley, California. She has given a number of interesting interviews over the years, and while I haven’t read transcripts of them all by any means, I would recommend reading her Paris Review interview published in 2015.
Film Adaptations
- A Thousand Acres (1997)
- Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
- Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Colin Firth (in a 2023 interview with Berkshire Magazine, Jane Smiley said she was a little disappointed because she was told Paul Newman was approached to play Larry, but he turned it down).
Further Reading
- In addition to some seventeen novels, Jane Smiley has also published short story collections, nonfiction works, young adult books, and even children’s books, as well as a memoir. Below are two of her novels that piqued my interest after reading A Thousand Acres, though I am admittedly no expert on her full body of work.
- Moo (1995), a rural satire that was a a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
- Some Luck (2014), the first novel in a trilogy about an Iowa family over the course of generations. It was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award.
Literary Context 1991-1992
- 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to South African activist and writer Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) “who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity.”
- 1991 National Book Award Winner: Mating by Norman Rush.
- 1991 Booker Prize Winner: The Famished Road by Ben Okri.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1991 was Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley. Other notable bestsellers included: The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy, Needful Things by Stephen King, No Greater Love by Danielle Steel, Heartbeat by Danielle Steel, The Firm by John Grisham, Night Over Water by Ken Follett, and Loves Music, Loves to Dance by Mary Higgins Clark.
- Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories by Agatha Christie was posthumously published.
- Don DeLillo’s Mao II was published, which would win the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
- Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho was published.
- Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander was published.
- John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel The Man from Barbarossa was published.
- John Grisham’s The Firm was published.
- Stephen King’s Needful Things was published.
- John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim was published.
- James A. Michener’s Mexico was published.
- José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was published.
- For Love of the Game by Michael Shaara was posthumously published.
- Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire was published, launching the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder was published.
- The third “Wheel of Time” book Dragon Reborn was published by Robert Jordan.
- Reaper Man and Witches Abroad were published by Terry Pratchett.
- Volume 1 and Volume 3 of The Sandman series were published by Neil Gaiman.
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
In some ways, A Thousand Acres reminded me of themes explored in earlier Pulitzer Prize winners like Now in November and Early Autumn, and to a lesser extent other King Lear-inspired Pulitzer Prize winners, such as His Family and A Summons to Memphis. And while the practice of ‘reimagining’ classic works of literature like King Lear and adapting them into a contemporary context is somewhat in vogue these days, I feel somewhat mixed about it. On the one hand, the classics are revitalized by this sort of thing, almost as if paying homage to a more enduring work of the past, but reimagined novels are derivative by nature and they force us to ask: why not write something new? Maybe that is a bit too harsh; I do have several more reimagined works still ahead of me on this journey through the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, most notably Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and James by Percival Everett. Perhaps I will further develop my thoughts on reimagined works by then. I would be delighted to hear strong opinions one way or the other on this phenomenon, but I’d say A Thousand Acres is a fitting selection for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991.
Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. Anchor Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, NY, 1991 (republished in 2003). It was dedicated “To Steve, as simple as that.” A Thousand Acres opens with an epilogue from Meridel le Sueur’s “The Ancient People and the Newly Come.”
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