Marilynne Robinson - City Arts & Lectures: On Art & Politics 2006 January 18, 2006

In conversation with Steven Winn
Wednesday, January 18

Twenty-four years after completing her first novel, Housekeeping, author Marilynne Robinson returned to fiction with Gilead. An intimate story of fathers and sons, spirituality, history, and the everyday, Gilead received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2004. In the tradition of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson, Robinson uses language as precise as it is radiant to describe the characters and landscapes of nineteenth century America. Through the modest voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead explores existential questions while illustrating the miracle of an ordinary life. Robinson?s first novel, Housekeeping, received the PEN/Hemingway award and is regarded by many as an American classic. A skilled and celebrated essayist, Robinson is also the author of Mother Country and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.