Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx: The Landscape Does the Killing

She was fifty-three when her first book of fiction appeared. She was fifty-seven when *Postcards* took the PEN/Faulkner Award, the first woman ever to win it, and fifty-eight when *The Shipping News* took the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the same season. The twenty years before that had been spent filing journalism and writing how-to manuals about gardening and making cider. Almost no career in American letters has been back-loaded so violently.

Cider Manuals and a Historian's Training

Edna Ann Proulx was born on 22 August 1935 in Norwich, Connecticut, to Georges-Napoléon Proulx, a French-Canadian who began in a textile mill and finished as a company vice president, and Lois Nellie Gill, whose maternal line had reached America in 1635. She went to Deering High School in Portland, Maine, started at Colby College, married, and left in 1955. She came back to education a decade later: a B.A. in history from the University of Vermont in 1969, *cum laude* and Phi Beta Kappa, then an M.A. in history from Concordia in Montreal in 1973. She passed her doctoral orals at Concordia in 1975 and walked away from the dissertation to write full time. That abandoned training is the most important thing about her fiction. She had already published one story — "The Customs Lounge," science fiction, in *If* magazine in 1963 — and for years she wrote for outdoor magazines as "E. A. Proulx," because male editors believed a female byline would drive readers away.

The Late Start

*Heart Songs and Other Stories* came out in 1988, when she was fifty-three. *Postcards* followed in 1992 and won the PEN/Faulkner. National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships arrived the same year. She had spent two decades learning how cider ferments, how a garden fails, how a dying town loses its people — the sort of knowledge that cannot be improvised at a desk.

The Shipping News

The 1993 novel won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and was filmed in 2001. Quoyle is a failed reporter from upstate New York who takes his two daughters to a remote ancestral house in Newfoundland and ends up covering the shipping news for the local paper. The style was the news: fragments and dense description, chapters headed with knots and quotations from Clifford W. Ashley's 1944 *Ashley Book of Knots*, which had set the book going. Even the names come from rope — a quoyle is a particular coil, which is the argument about its owner in a single word.

The Archive at Bird Cloud

From 1994 she based herself in Wyoming, eventually at the ranch she called Bird Cloud near Saratoga. What she built there was less a study than a research institution. She told *The Paris Review* that her libraries are sorted by subject — water, fire, the fur trade, maritime, rodeo, livestock, death, the Indian wars — and that she keeps a running notebook of character names, revising a single name six or seven times as a story develops. "The John Smiths of the literary world make me sick," she said. She sets her fiction in rural places on the conviction that you cannot write a rural story honestly without knowing the actual ground. She has done this nomadically: more than thirty years in Vermont, seasons in northern Newfoundland near L'Anse aux Meadows, latterly Port Townsend, Washington. Three marriages, three divorces, four children — Jonathan, Gillis, Morgan and Sylvia.

Brokeback Mountain

*The New Yorker* published "Brokeback Mountain" on 13 October 1997. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are high-school dropouts off poor ranches, hired in 1963 to tend sheep on a Wyoming mountain Proulx invented; the twenty years that follow are lived out on periodic camping trips around other people's marriages. It took the 1998 National Magazine Award for Fiction and a third-place O. Henry Prize, and a slightly expanded version anchored *Close Range: Wyoming Stories* (1999), a Pulitzer finalist. Ang Lee's 2005 film won at the Academy Awards, the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes; in 2014 it became an opera with a libretto by Proulx. Success of that scale had a cost she did not want: by 2008 she was complaining publicly about readers mailing her alternative endings and "pornish rewrites" of her own story, offered as improvements.

The Wyoming Books and the Forests

*Accordion Crimes* followed in 1996 and *That Old Ace in the Hole* in 2002. Then came *Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2* (2004) and *Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3* (2008), completing the trilogy begun with *Close Range* — and Proulx has said she rates those three collections above her novels, a rare public admission by a novelist that the short form is where the work is best. *Barkskins* (2016) was adapted by National Geographic as a television series in 2020. *Bird Cloud: A Memoir* (2011) took its title from the Wyoming ranch. *Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction* (2022) left fiction behind altogether, which is one way of saying the landscape finally stopped needing characters to speak through.

Why Annie Is Called a Genius

The distinguishing faculty is not verbal facility, though she has that. It is a historian's method applied to fiction, and a specific causal theory underneath it: in Proulx, landscape and material economy are not background but the engine. Weather, rope, sheep, an accordion, the ground itself — these are what act on people, and character is largely what is left after the terrain has finished with it. Almost no other American novelist works this way, and it requires the two things she actually has: doctoral-level archival discipline, evidenced by subject-classified libraries and decades of field knowledge, and an ear for regional vernacular precise enough to build a whole voice out of fragments. The naming notebook is the tell — she will rework one name seven times because she believes the sound of it carries information.

The honest counter-case is that this is largely diligence. Accumulating research is a virtue, not a spark, and her own verdict — that the Wyoming stories beat the novels — concedes that the large architecture is where she is weakest. The fame of "Brokeback Mountain" rests substantially on a film she did not make. And she is suspicious of exactly this kind of canonisation: institutions, she has said, are "head-hunting for trophy writers. You're there as a human object, one that has won a prize. It gives you a very odd, meat-rack kind of sensation." She would likely regard this section as the meat rack. The defensible claim is narrower and stronger than the word: she solved a problem — how to make geology and economics behave like plot — that most writers do not know is a problem.

Legacy

The John Dos Passos Prize came in 1997, a United States Artists Fellowship in 2012, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2017 and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2018. Concordia, which never got its dissertation, awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1999. She had arrived at fiction two decades late and rearranged the map of it anyway: after Proulx, American rural writing could no longer treat place as scenery.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Vermont, Colby College and Sir George Williams University
• Worked as screenwriter, novelist and journalist