Edna Ann Proulx ( ; born August 22, 1935) is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E. A. Proulx.

She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards (1992), making her the first woman to receive the prize. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Her first name honored one of her mother's aunts. She is of English and French-Canadian ancestry. Her maternal forebears came to America in 1635, 15 years after the Mayflower arrived.

Proulx lived in multiple states along the East Coast during her childhood as her father worked his way up through the textile industry. She wrote her first story at the age of 10, while sick with chicken pox. She briefly attended Colby College, where she met her first husband, H. Ridgely Bullock Jr., and dropped out to marry him in 1955. Proulx pursued a PhD at Concordia and passed her oral examinations in 1975, but abandoned her dissertation before completing the degree. In 1999, Concordia awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Proulx lived for more than 30 years in Vermont, has been married and divorced three times, and has three sons and a daughter (Jonathan, Gillis, Morgan, and Sylvia). In 1994, she moved to Bird Cloud, a ranch in Saratoga, Wyoming, spending part of the year in northern Newfoundland on a small cove adjacent to L'Anse aux Meadows. As of 2019, Proulx lived in Port Townsend, Washington.

Writing career and recognition

Starting as a journalist, her first published work of fiction was "The Customs Lounge", a science fiction story published in the September 1963 issue of If, under the byline "E. A. Proulx".

A year later, her science fiction story "All the Pretty Little Horses" appeared in the teen magazine Seventeen in June 1964. She subsequently published stories in Esquire magazine and Gray's Sporting Journal in the late 1970s, as well as how-to manuals for cooking and gardening. Proulx published her first short-story collection, Heart Songs, in 1988 and her first novel, Postcards, in 1992. She was awarded a NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1992. Her 1993 novel The Shipping News was adapted into a 2001 film. Set in Newfoundland yet written by someone "from away" (not from Newfoundland), the novel stresses the vicarious quality of Proulx' writing.

She had the following comment on her celebrity status:

In 1997, Proulx was awarded the Dos Passos Prize, a mid-career award for American writers. Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year's best short story. In 1998, she won for "Brokeback Mountain", which had appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. Proulx won again the following year for "The Mud Below", which appeared in The New Yorker June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The lead story in this collection, entitled "The Half-Skinned Steer", was selected by author Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1998, (Proulx herself edited the 1997 edition of this series) and later by novelist John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). In 2011 Proulx published, Bird Cloud: A Memoir, largely based on her former Wyoming ranch of the same name. In 2017, she received the Fitzgerald Award for that year for Achievement in American Literature.

Bibliography

Nonfiction

  • Plan and Make Your Own Fences & Gates, Walkways, Walls & Drives (1983),
  • The Fine Art of Salad Gardening. 1985.
  • The Gourmet Gardener: Growing Choice Fruits and Vegetables with Spectacular Results (1987),
  • Bird Cloud: A Memoir (2011),
  • Foreword (2018) In: Wild Migrations: Atlas of Wyoming's Ungulates. Alethea Y. Steingisser, Emilene Ostlind, Hall Sawyer, James E. Meacham, Matthew J. Kauffman, and William J. Rudd (Eds.).
  • Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (2022)

Essay

  • Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only Let Them. In: The New Yorker, June 27, 2022 (July 4, 2022).

Novels

  • Postcards (1992),
  • The Shipping News (1993),
  • Accordion Crimes (1996),
  • That Old Ace in the Hole (2002),
  • Barkskins (2016),

Short fiction

Collections

  • Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), ; republished with altered but similar content as trade paperback Heart Songs (1994)
  • Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999),
  • Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004),
  • Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (2008),

Stories

{|class='wikitable sortable' width='90%'

|-

!width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

!|Notes

|-

|Rough Deeds

|2013

|

|

|

|-

|A Resolute Man

|2016

|

|

|

|-

|The Corn Woman, Her Husband, and Their Child

|2025

|Proulx, Annie (August 18, 2025"). "The Corn Woman, Her Husband, and Their Child". The New Yorker. Vol. 101, no. 24. pp. 44-56.

|-

|

|

|}

thumb|Annie Proulx receives the Prize for American Fiction from [[Carla Hayden at the 2018 National Book Festival. ]]

Awards and recognition

  • 1993—PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (Postcards)
  • 1994—Pulitzer Prize, Fiction The Shipping News
  • 1997—Shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize (Accordion Crimes)
  • 1997—John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (for body of work)
  • 1999—"The Mud Below," O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories 1999
  • 1999—"The Bunchgrass Edge of the World," The Best American Short Stories 1999
  • 1999—"Half-Skinned Steer", The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike
  • 2000—English-Speaking Union's Ambassador Book Award (Close Range: Wyoming Stories)
  • 2000—"People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," The Best American Short Stories 2000
  • 2000—Borders Original Voices Award in Fiction (Close Range, Wyoming Stories)
  • 2002—Best Foreign Language Novels of 2002 / Best American Novel Award, Chinese Publishing Association and Peoples' Literature Publishing House (That Old Ace in the Hole)
  • 2004—Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for "The Wamsutter Wolf"
  • 2012—United States Artists Fellow award
  • 2017—National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (lifetime achievement)
  • 2018—Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

Adaptations

  • The Shipping News (2001) was directed by Lasse Hallström and featured Kevin Spacey as the protagonist Quoyle, Judi Dench as Agnis Hamm and Julianne Moore as Wavey Prowse.
  • Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, was based on a story of the same name in Proulx's collection of short stories, Close Range.
  • Barkskins, a National Geographic television series based on Proulx's 2016 novel, premiered on May 25, 2020.

References

Further reading

  • [//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1000116950&v=2.1&u=ucdavis&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w "Annie Proulx."] Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011.
  • Hennessy, Denis M. [//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1200013347&v=2.1&u=ucdavis&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w "Annie Proulx."] American Short-Story Writers Since World War II: Fifth Series. Ed. Richard E. Lee and Patrick Meanor. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 335.
  • Books That Changed My Life PEN World Voices at the New York Public Library May 4, 2008
  • An Interview with Annie Proulx , Bookslut, December 2005.
  • Interview with Annie Proulx in the Fall 2005 Wyoming Library Roundup (PDF 3.69 MB)