A short life of the author
Roxana Robinson (born 1946) is an American novelist, short story writer, and biographer whose fiction explores the emotional landscapes of upper-middle-class American family life — divorce, addiction, aging, the fraying of familial bonds — with a psychological precision and moral seriousness that have drawn comparisons to Chekhov, John Cheever, and Edith Wharton. Her biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989) is the standard life of the artist, and her novels — particularly Cost (2008) and Sparta (2013) — have established her as one of the most accomplished American literary novelists of her generation.
Life
Robinson grew up in a privileged WASP milieu on the East Coast and was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.) and Columbia University’s School of the Arts (MFA). She has lived in New York and Maine, and both settings — the Manhattan apartment and the Maine summer house — appear frequently in her fiction. She served as president of the Authors Guild (2014–2017) and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and other publications.
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989)
Robinson’s biography of Georgia O’Keeffe was the first to draw on the artist’s personal papers and letters and remains the most comprehensive and authoritative account of O’Keeffe’s life. The biography traces O’Keeffe’s childhood in Wisconsin, her education, her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz (which Robinson treats with nuance, showing both its creative fertility and its emotional tyranny), her move to New Mexico, and her long widowhood and artistic decline.
The book was praised for its meticulous research and its sympathetic but unsentimental treatment of O’Keeffe as both an artist and a woman. It established Robinson as a serious literary figure and set the standard against which all subsequent O’Keeffe biographies have been measured.
Fiction
Robinson’s short story collections — A Glimpse of Scarlet (1991) and Asking for Love (1996) — established the territory of her fiction: the emotional lives of affluent East Coast families, explored through moments of domestic crisis. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Best American Short Stories.
Summer Light (1988) — her first novel — and This Is My Daughter (1998) — about a woman’s relationship with her stepdaughter — are accomplished but relatively conventional domestic novels.
Cost (2008) is Robinson’s breakthrough novel. It follows Julia Lambert, an art historian spending the summer in her family’s Maine house, as she confronts her son Jack’s heroin addiction. The novel is devastating in its precision: Robinson traces the way addiction radiates outward through a family, destroying trust, exhausting love, and forcing impossible choices. The title refers not only to the financial cost of addiction but to the moral and emotional costs that family members pay. It was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Nantucket Book Award.
Sparta (2013) follows Conrad Farrell, a young Marine returning from Iraq to his family’s home in the Hudson Valley, struggling with PTSD and the impossibility of communicating his experience to the people who love him. The novel is admired for its restrained, psychologically acute portrayal of the soldier’s homecoming — Robinson avoids both heroic sentimentalism and anti-war polemic in favour of close attention to the texture of a damaged consciousness.
Dawson’s Fall (2019) draws on Robinson’s own family history, set in South Carolina during Reconstruction.
Critical Standing
Robinson is admired by critics and fellow writers but has not achieved wide popular readership. Her fiction is too quiet and psychologically demanding for bestseller lists, but her best work — particularly Cost and Sparta — is of genuinely high quality. She is frequently compared to Anne Tyler and Alice Munro in her attention to the emotional lives of ordinary people.
Collecting Robinson
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989, Harper & Row) in first edition brings $20–$50. Cost (2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) brings $10–$30. Her books are widely available and modestly priced.