Annie Proulx

Edna Annie Proulx (born 22 August 1935 in Norwich, Connecticut) is an American novelist and short story writer who came to fiction late — she published her first novel at fifty-seven — and whose work, set in the harshest landscapes of North America, is written in a prose style so compressed, so physically precise, and so saturated with the weather and terrain of its settings that reading it is almost a sensory experience.

Late Start

Proulx worked as a journalist, freelance writer, and editor for decades before turning to fiction. She published her first story collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), at fifty-three, and her first novel, Postcards (1992), at fifty-seven — winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, an extraordinary debut achievement. She has said that her long apprenticeship in nonfiction — she wrote books about cider-making, gardening, and New England rural life — taught her to observe the physical world with the precision that distinguishes her fiction.

The Shipping News (1993)

Proulx’s second novel won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award — a rare double. Set in a fictional Newfoundland outport, it follows Quoyle, a hapless, overweight, recently widowed journalist who moves with his two daughters and his aunt to the ancestral family home on the remote Newfoundland coast. The novel is at once a comic redemption story, a love letter to Newfoundland’s landscape and culture, and a meditation on the possibility of reinvention.

The prose is Proulx’s signature: short, punchy sentences; vivid physical description; fragments and compressions that mimic the harshness of the environment. The Newfoundland setting — its weather, its icebergs, its fishing communities, its particular vocabulary — is rendered with an intensity that borders on the anthropological.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999)

Proulx moved to Wyoming in the mid-1990s, and the state became the setting for three extraordinary story collections: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). The Wyoming stories are set among ranchers, rodeo riders, and rural workers living lives of physical hardship, emotional repression, and occasional explosive violence. The landscape — mountains, wind, snow, vast empty spaces — is a constant, implacable presence.

The most famous story in Close Range is “Brokeback Mountain,” about two Wyoming ranch hands who begin a sexual relationship during a summer herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain and who carry on a doomed, intermittent love affair for twenty years, unable either to commit to each other or to let each other go. The story was adapted by Ang Lee into a 2005 film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal that won three Academy Awards and became a cultural landmark.

Barkskins (2016)

Proulx’s most ambitious novel is an epic spanning three centuries and multiple continents, following two families — one French, one English — from the forests of seventeenth-century New France to the present day. The novel is a history of deforestation, told through the lives of loggers, timber barons, scientists, and indigenous peoples. It is Proulx’s most explicitly environmental work and her most structurally ambitious, though its enormous scope occasionally overwhelms its characters.

Other Novels

Accordion Crimes (1996) follows a green accordion through a century of American immigration, each chapter set in a different ethnic community. That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) is set in the Texas panhandle and satirises the corporate hog-farming industry.

Style and Critical Standing

Proulx’s prose is among the most distinctive in contemporary American fiction. She writes in compressed, elliptical sentences that omit articles, compress syntax, and foreground physical sensation — a style that recalls Henry Green in its dropped articles but is wholly her own in its muscular physicality. Her descriptions of weather, landscape, and physical labour are extraordinarily precise. Her dialogue captures the rhythms and vocabularies of rural speech without condescension.

Her critical reputation rests on a relatively small body of work — three major novels, three Wyoming story collections, and the epic Barkskins — but the quality is remarkably consistent. She belongs in the company of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry as a writer of the American West, though her West is colder, more punishing, and more attentive to the ecological consequences of settlement. Where McCarthy mythologises the landscape, Proulx documents it — and the documentation, in her hands, achieves its own kind of grandeur.

The late start is significant. Proulx arrived in fiction fully formed, without the apprentice fumbling that characterises most literary careers. Her first novel won a major prize; her second won two. The decades of nonfiction writing — observing, researching, reporting — gave her a technical command that younger writers spend novels acquiring. There is no early Proulx: there is only Proulx.

Collecting Proulx

Heart Songs (1988, Scribner) in first edition is scarce and the primary Proulx collectible. The Shipping News (1993, Scribner) in first edition with dust jacket is widely collected. Close Range (1999) in first edition is sought, particularly for “Brokeback Mountain.”