Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen (born July 8, 1953, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American columnist and novelist who in 1992 became the third woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Her columns were noted for seeming to speak directly to each of her readers about the issues that concerned them, and she brought an insightful, personal view to political, especially gender-specific, issues. Quindlen employed a similar style in such novels as her best-seller One True Thing (1994).

Early life and education

Quindlen was the eldest of five children raised in Philadelphia by an Irish American father and an Italian American mother. She was a bright student, and her parents were supportive, but she has recalled feeling “dissatisfied” as a child. In 2024 she told Publishers Weekly, “I was growing up at a time when there was no place for an assertive, argumentative, ambitious girl. There were two jobs, teacher and nurse, and neither of them seemed suited to my abilities.” When Quindlen was a teenager her family moved to New Jersey, where she graduated from high school.

From a young age, Quindlen wanted to be a writer. She began her newspaper career as a part-time reporter for The Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey, followed by the New York Post when she was a student at Barnard College in New York City. At age 19, however, Quindlen temporarily dropped out of college to care for her mother, who was dying of cancer. It was a profoundly formative experience. She told Publishers Weekly, “I cooked meals and administered morphine and I wasn’t a happy camper. Luckily, I had a loving mother who never said to me, ‘You’re not doing a good job at this, kid.’ ”

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At the same time she was galvanized by the activism of second-wave feminists. In 2012 she told National Public Radio, “Many of my professors were feminists. There was so much going on in the world of journalism. There was a sit-in at Newsweek, there was a class-action suit against The New York Times. I just threw my lot in.”

Career in journalism

Quindlen received a B.A. degree in 1974 and went to work at the Post full-time. In 1977 she moved to The New York Times to be a general assignment and city hall reporter. She was one of several women who had been hired as a direct result of the 1974 class-action lawsuit against the paper. In 1978 Quindlen married Gerald Krovatin, an attorney (they divorced in 2021). From 1981 to 1983, when she became the paper’s deputy metropolitan editor, she wrote the biweekly column “About New York.”

In 1985 Quindlen left the Times to stay at home with her two young sons, Quindlen and Christopher, and work on a novel, but she returned to journalism in late 1986 to write the “Life in the 30’s” column. Within two years it was being published in some 60 newspapers. The birth of her daughter, Maria, in late 1988 led her to quit again, but a year later she was lured back to the Times, this time with an offer to write a column on the op-ed page. “Public & Private” debuted early in 1990, and Quindlen’s popularity continued to grow.

Novels

While a columnist, Quindlen began writing novels. Her first—Object Lessons, a coming-of-age story—appeared in 1991 and became a best-seller. The experience of caring for her mother formed the basis of her second novel, One True Thing. released three years later. In interviews, however, Quindlen has attempted to dispel characterizations of the book as being purely autobiographical. In 2019 she told Grand magazine, “[The characters] are so utterly different from me, my mother, and my father that that completely changes my orientation to the material. The backdrop, the scenery of mortal illness, owes a great deal to life, but drop a different cast of characters into it and personally it feels quite different, much more like something that’s happening to someone else. Because in fact, it is.” A film adaptation starring Renée Zellweger, Meryl Streep, and William Hurt was released in 1998. The success of these books led Quindlen to leave the Times in December 1994 to pursue a full-time career as a novelist.

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Quindlen’s later novels include Black and Blue (1998), an unflinching look at domestic violence; Blessings (2002), which centers on an abandoned baby; Rise and Shine (2006), an examination of the relationship between two sisters; Still Life with Breadcrumbs (2014), a love story featuring a sexagenarian heroine; Miller’s Valley (2016), a family drama about the upheaval of a farming community that is to be flooded to create a reservoir; and Alternate Side (2018), about a violent incident and its impact on a neighborhood. Several of her novels were adapted into television movies.

In 2024 she published After Annie, which follows a family’s experience with loss and grief. Two years later she released More Than Enough, a novel about a private-school teacher in New York who discovers she has a mystery relative after taking a genetic ancestry test. In a review published in The New York Times, fellow novelist Jennifer Weiner called Quindlen “as observant and as wonderfully readable as ever” but noted that her comfortably privileged characters made the book seem “a little dated and rose-tinted, less Zohran Mamdani than Nancy Meyers.”

Nonfiction and other works

Quindlen also wrote such nonfiction works as A Short Guide to a Happy Life (2000); Good Dog. Stay (2007), a tribute to her Labrador retriever; Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (2012); and Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting (2019). Living Out Loud (1988) and Thinking Out Loud (1993) are among the collections of her columns. In 1999 Quindlen joined Newsweek magazine, for which she wrote the column “My Turn” until May 2009.