Author
Annie Proulx
Birth Date
August 22, 1935
(90 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Annie Proulx is an American-born novelist and short story writer known for her stark, vividly detailed depictions of rural life and working-class struggles. She was born in Norwich, Connecticut and later lived in several U.S. states before settling in Wyoming and eventually moving to Canada. Her writing is strongly influenced by landscapes and the harsh conditions of remote communities.
Proulx first gained major recognition with her novel The Shipping News (1993), which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She is also widely known for her short story “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), later adapted into an acclaimed film. Other notable works include Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and the Wyoming Stories collections, including Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.
Her writing is characterized by its realism, attention to regional detail, and often bleak but powerful portrayals of human resilience. Proulx is considered one of the most important contemporary American writers of rural and regional fiction.
Proulx first gained major recognition with her novel The Shipping News (1993), which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She is also widely known for her short story “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), later adapted into an acclaimed film. Other notable works include Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and the Wyoming Stories collections, including Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.
Her writing is characterized by its realism, attention to regional detail, and often bleak but powerful portrayals of human resilience. Proulx is considered one of the most important contemporary American writers of rural and regional fiction.
Books
Annie Proulx’s “gritty and gleaming stories” (New York Times Book Review) are about loneliness, violence, desperation, and the wrong kinds of love. In “The Mud Below,” a rodeo rider’s obsession marks...
Brokeback Mountain 2025
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they’re working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the...
Fen, Bog and Swamp 2023
A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the...
Barkskins 2017
In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become woodcutters—barkskins....
Bird Cloud 2011
“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in...
Bad Dirt 2005
Annie Proulx’s new collection is peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control. Born to ranching, drawn to it, or desperate to get out, they inhabit worlds that are...
Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted...
Close Range 2000
Annie Proulx’s masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In “The Mud Below,” a rodeo rider’s...
Accordion Crimes 1997
Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of...
These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed...
Postcards 1994
After committing a violent act that he cannot undo, Loyal Blood leaves his family’s farm in rural Vermont and begins a life of restless wandering across the American landscape. Moving from place to...
The Shipping News 1994
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on...