It was made into a film, as was her short story Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys who fall in love. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a best-seller. She bought it for a dollar and was fascinated by the illustrations and quotes, which she ended up using for chapter headings in the book. She says, “I wrote that one because I was madly in love with Newfoundland, so for me it was a joy.” She was inspired to write the book after finding an old copy of The Ashley Book of Knots at a yard sale. She was living in Newfoundland at the time and working on what would become her second novel, The Shipping News, about a sad man named Quoyle who moves to a small fishing village in Newfoundland. Proulx was 56 when her first novel, Postcards, was published in 1992. She once described a female character as “thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout.” She wrote mostly about rural life and the men who worked farms, mills, and oil rigs. Her first story collection was Heart Songs and Other Stories. And then I discovered that I could actually do it.” When asked about the start to her writing career, she said, “I only backed into it in order to make a living. She traded one story for a canoe when the magazine didn’t have enough to pay her. She was also writing short stories about rural life that often involved hunting and fishing, which she sold to magazines like Gray’s Sporting Journal and Esquire.

Proulx divorced her husband and raised three sons as a single mother, earning money by writing how-to books like Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It and The Fine Art of Salad Gardening. Having to get along with people you don’t respect very much, having to deal with a bureaucracy, just the whole weight of idiots turned me off.” She said, “I’m not a person who works well with others. program after realizing she wasn’t fit for the academic life. from the University of Vermont, but she dropped out of a Ph.D. She had children and later returned to college, earning a B.A. She attended Colby College briefly, but left to get married. She said, “Almost every book I’ve read has left its mark.” As an adolescent, she was devoted to William Faulkner, S.J. Both her parents valued fresh air and exercise and Proulx spent her childhood traipsing outside and reading, especially science fiction and books by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She was born Edna Ann Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut.

It’s the birthday of American novelist Annie Proulx, who won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Shipping News.

Annie proulx cider