Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson (born November 26, 1943, Sandpoint, Idaho, U.S.) is an American author known for her graceful language and studied observations on humankind and religion in works of fiction and nonfiction. Her best-known works include her debut novel, Housekeeping (1980), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004).

Early life, education, and debut novel

Summers grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the daughter of a taciturn father who worked his way up in the timber industry and a stay-at-home mother. She had a close relationship with her elder brother, David Summers, who predicted that he would become an artist and she a poet. His prophecy was not far from the truth, as he became a noted scholar on Renaissance art and she a writer. Her third book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), is dedicated to him as the “first and best of my teachers.” In 1966 Summers graduated from Brown University, where she studied American literature. She then pursued a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington, graduating in 1977. She wrote her dissertation on William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, from which she acquired a penchant for primary texts. During this time, she also married (later divorced) and took her husband’s surname, Robinson.

While working on her Ph.D. dissertation, Robinson began an experiment with metaphors, which figured prominently in her debut novel, Housekeeping (1980). The story follows two adolescent sisters—Ruth, the narrator, and Lucille—who are passed between relatives after their mother dies by suicide and who eventually come into the care of their transient aunt Sylvie. Anatole Broyard’s enthusiastic review for The New York Times ensured the small, unassuming book had an audience. It received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

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Early nonfiction and other works

Robinson subsequently turned her attention to essays and book reviews for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. A short story that she wrote in college, “Connie Bronson,” was published in The Paris Review in 1986. She also served as a writer in residence and as a visiting professor at several universities on the East Coast and in England.

While on sabbatical in England, Robinson came across a newspaper article on the Sellafield complex, a government-run nuclear reprocessing plant in northern England, and the damage it caused to the environment and to the health of its workers and the nearby community. She wrote an angry but reasoned article for Harper’s Magazine in response, and she extended the discussion in her first nonfiction book, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989). The work was a finalist for the National Book Award. Nearly a decade after Mother Country, Robinson published a book of scholarly essays titled The Death of Adam (1998), which challenged the accepted views of historical figures such as John Calvin and Charles Darwin and raised philosophical and ethical questions on how to live.

Later fiction

After a decades-long absence from fiction, Robinson returned with Gilead (2004), a novel set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, during the 1950s. The ailing Reverend John Ames chronicles his family’s history in a series of daily letters addressed to his young son for him to read as an adult. In doing so, Ames tells the ambitious story of America while examining the human condition. Robinson was praised for her careful observations and graceful descriptions, winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Robinson revisited the characters of Gilead in three additional novels: Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). In Home she turned her attention to John Ames’s best friend, the former Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton. Boughton’s youngest daughter, Glory, narrates the family drama that occurs alongside the events of Gilead when she and her prodigal brother, Jack, return home to their indulgent father. Home was received enthusiastically and won the Orange Prize for Fiction (later the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2009. Lila is a prequel to Gilead, telling the story of John Ames’s wife, the eponymous Lila, who appears mostly in passing in earlier works. The novel recounts her hellacious upbringing and the redemption that her poignant marriage gives her. Lila was also well received, winning the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award. The fourth installment in the series, Jack, is told from the titular character’s perspective and centers on his interracial relationship with a Black woman.

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Later nonfiction and other works

In between writing fiction, Robinson also published collections of essays, frequently and eloquently defending her Christian faith. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) evolved from a series of lectures she gave at Yale University in 2009 addressing the debate between science and religion. She continued the discussion on science, religion, politics, and culture with When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) and The Givenness of Things (2015).

In 2012 Robinson was awarded the National Humanities Medal for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” A few years after meeting Robinson at the awards ceremony, U.S. Pres. Barack Obama conducted an interview with Robinson that appeared in The New York Review of Books. During their conversation, he addressed some of the topics Robinson explored in The Givenness of Things, particularly the chapter “Fear” and the role of fear in the divisive political climate during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Robinson began teaching in the M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa in 1989 and became a member of the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991. After 25 years, she retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor in 2016, assuming the title of professor emerita. She continued to write, and in 2018 she published What Are We Doing Here?, a collection of essays based on lectures that address the cost of ceding critical thought to flat ideologies and orthodox principles. In 2024 Robinson published Reading Genesis, a learned, riveting interpretation of the first book of the Bible.