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Marilynne Robinson
Robinson in 2012
Born	Marilynne Summers (1943-11-26) November 26, 1943 (age 81) Sandpoint, Idaho, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist essayist
Education	Brown University (BA) University of Washington (MA, PhD)
Notable awards	Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (1981) National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2004, 2014) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2005) Orange Prize for Fiction (2009) National Humanities Medal (2012) Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2016)
Spouse	Fred Robinson ​ ​(m. 1967; div. 1989)​
Children	2

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Early life and education

Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Ellen (Harris) and John J. Summers, a lumber company employee. Her brother is the art historian David Summers, who dedicated his book Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting to her. She did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her BA magna cum laude in 1966, and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Brown, one of her teachers was the postmodern novelist John Hawkes. She received her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977.

Writing career

Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home and Lila are companions to Gilead and focus on the Boughton and Ames families during the same time period.

Robinson is also the author of many nonfiction works, including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Reading Genesis was released on March 12, 2024. Her novels and nonfiction works have been translated into 36 languages.

She has written numerous articles, essays and reviews for Harper's, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books.

Academic affiliations

In addition to her tenure from 1991 to 2016 on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where she retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing, Robinson has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many colleges and universities, including Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets and Writers.

In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Robinson was selected by the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University to deliver the 2018 Hulsean Lectures on Christian theology. She was the fourth woman selected for the series which was established in 1790.  She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2023, Robinson received the Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus from the University of Washington, the highest honor bestowed upon a graduate of the university.

The Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of writer and essayist Marilynne Robinson.

Honors and awards

Robinson has received numerous literary, theological and academic honors, among them the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the 2013 Park Kyong-ni Prize, and the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2021, the Tulsa Library Trust presented her with the Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.  Robinson's alma mater, the University of Washington, honored her with their 2022 Alumni Summa Laude Dignata Award.

Robinson has received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities and colleges, starting with Oxford University in 2010 and Brown University in 2012, and followed most recently by the University of Iowa, Yale University, Boston College, Cambridge University, and the University of Portland.

Commendations

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists", adding that "Robinson's is a voice we urgently need to attend to in both Church and society here ."

On June 26, 2015, President Barack Obama quoted Robinson in his eulogy for Clementa C. Pinckney of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In speaking about "an open heart," Obama said: "hat a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'" In November 2015, The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between Obama and Robinson, covering topics in American history and the role of faith in society.

Personal life

Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin have been important in many of her novels, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker."

In 1967 she married Fred Miller Robinson, a writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Robinsons divorced in 1989. The couple have two sons. In the late 1970s, she wrote Housekeeping in the evenings while they slept. Robinson said they influenced her writing in many ways, since " changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself."

Robinson divides her time between northern California and upstate New York.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (February 2015)

Fiction

• —— (1980). Housekeeping. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374525187.
• —— (2004). Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780312424404.
• —— (2008). Home. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780009732997.
• —— (2014). Lila. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781844088812.
• —— (2020). Jack. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374279301.

Online fiction

• Kansas - published in The New Yorker on September 6, 2004
• Jack and Della - published in The New Yorker on July 13, 2020

Nonfiction

Books

• —— (1989). Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374526597.
• —— (1998). The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Picador. ISBN 9780312425326.
• —— (2010). Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300171471.
• —— (2012). When I Was a Child I Read Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374298784.
• —— (2015). The Givenness of Things: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781250097316.
• —— (2018). What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374282219.
• —— (2024). Reading Genesis. Abacus. ISBN 9780349018744.

Essays and reportage

• "Bad News From Britain: Dangerous Chemicals, Awful Silence", Harper's Magazine, February, 1985
• "A Great Amnesia", Harper's Magazine, May 2008
• "On 'Beauty'". Tin House. 50. Winter 2011.
• "On Edgar Allan Poe", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 2 (February 5, 2015), pp. 4, 6.
• "Humanism, Science, and the Radical Expansion of the Possible". The Nation. November 2015.
• "Fear". New York Review of Books. 62 (14). Fall 2015.
• "Save Our Public Universities", Harper's Magazine, March, 2016
• "Which Way to the City on a Hill?". New York Review of Books. 66 (12). Summer 2019.
• "Is Poverty Necessary?", Harper's Magazine, June, 2019
• "What Kind of Country Do We Want?". New York Review of Books. 67 (10). June 11, 2020.
• "What Does It Mean to Love a Country? (online: Don't Give Up on America)". The New York Times. October 9, 2020.
• The Gun-violence Plague is Evolving, Dangerously, The Washington Post, June 17, 2022
• One Manner of Law, Harper's Magazine, July, 2022
• Glories Stream from Heaven Afar, New York Review of Books, December 25, 2022
• Dismantling Iowa, New York Review of Books, November 2, 2023
• "And It Was So: Creation in Genesis", Harper's Magazine, February, 2024

Interviews

• "Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction, No. 198", The Paris Review, Fall 2008.
• A September 2015 interview with Barack Obama in Des Moines, Iowa, recorded by the New York Review of Books and published in the October issues of the magazine in two parts
• "Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Beauty, Human Evil and the Idea of Israel", The Ezra Klein Show, March 5, 2024

Awards

• 1982: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel for Housekeeping
• 1982: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction shortlist for Housekeeping
• 1989: National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution
• 1999: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for The Death of Adam
• 2004: National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Gilead
• 2005: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead
• 2005: Ambassador Book Award for Gilead
• 2006: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion
• 2008: National Book Award finalist for Home
• 2008: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction for Home
• 2009: Orange Prize for Fiction for Home
• 2011: Man Booker International Prize nominee
• 2012: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Brown University
• 2012: National Humanities Medal for "grace and intelligence in writing"
• 2013: Man Booker International Prize nominee
• 2013: Park Kyong-ni Prize
• 2014: National Book Critics Circle Award for Lila
• 2014: National Book Award finalist for Lila
• 2015: Man Booker Prize longlist for Lila
• 2016: Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and Dayton Literary Peace Prize
• 2017: Chicago Tribune Literary Award
• 2019: Newberry Library Award
• 2021: Tulsa Library Trust Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
• 2023: University of Washington Alumni Summa Laude Dignata Award

Honorary degrees

• 2007:   Amherst College
• 2010:   Skidmore College
• 2011:   Holy Cross
• 2011:   Oxford University
• 2012:   Brown University
• 2013:   University of the South
• 2013:   Notre Dame
• 2015:   Liverpool Hope University
• 2016:   Lund University
• 2017:   University of Iowa
• 2017:   Duke University
• 2018:   Yale University
• 2019:   Boston College
• 2019:   Cambridge University
• 2019:   University of Portland

References

1. This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. BRILL. 2015-09-25. ISBN 9789004302235.
2. 100 Most Influential People Marilynne Robinson Time, April 2016
3. "UI Writers' Workshop faculty member Marilynne Robinson win quarter-million-dollar award". February 4, 1998. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
4. "Robinson to retire from Iowa Writers' Workshop". Iowa Now. 2016-04-27. Retrieved 2016-04-27.
5. McCrum, Robert (April 2, 2005). "A love letter to lost America". The Guardian. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
6. "Marilynne Robinson: Sandpoint Memories". NEA. 2010-04-06. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
7. Werlock, Abby H. P. (22 April 2015). Encyclopedia of the American Novel. Infobase Learning. ISBN 9781438140698.
8. "Hill & Wood Funeral Service | Charlottesville, VA Funeral Home & Cremation".
9. This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. BRILL. 2015-09-25. ISBN 9789004302235.
10. "History & Literature of the Pacific Northwest: Marilynne Robinson, 1943". Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington. n.d. Retrieved 2008-04-13.
11. Lister, Rachel (2006-10-21). "Marilynne Robinson (1947– )". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2009-06-22.
12. "Home by Marilynne Robinson". Us.macmillan.com. Archived from the original on 2010-07-22. Retrieved 2015-10-29.
13. Dave Itzkoff, "Marilynne Robinson Wins Orange Prize", The New York Times, June 3, 2009.
14. Robinson, Marilynne (2016-03-01). "Save Our Public Universities". Harper's Magazine. ISSN 0017-789X. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
15. Fay, Interviewed by Sarah. "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
16. "Marilynne Robinson". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
17. Max, D. T. (2012-09-07). "D.F.W. Week: The Wonderfully Arrogant First Pitch Letter". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
18. "American Academy of Arts & Sciences". Amacad.org. January 1999. Retrieved 2015-10-29.
19. "Marilynne Robinson ('77) Receives the UW's Highest Alumni Honor | Department of English | University of Washington". english.washington.edu. Retrieved 2024-08-11.
20. "Marilynne Robinson Papers | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library". beinecke.library.yale.edu/. Retrieved 2024-08-29.
21. Williams, Rowan, "Mighty plea for reasonableness", Church Times, 12 August 2012
22. "Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney". whitehouse.gov. 2015-06-26. Retrieved 2015-10-29 – via National Archives.
23. Robinson, Marilynne; Obama, President Barack (November 5, 2015). "President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa". The New York Review of Books. 62 (17). Retrieved August 21, 2016.
24. Robinson, Marilynne; Obama, President Barack (November 19, 2015). "President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II". The New York Review of Books. 62 (18). Retrieved August 21, 2016.
25. "Marilynne Robinson interview: The faith behind the fiction", Reform, September 2010.
26. "Marilynne Robinson", Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, September 18, 2009.
27. "Marilynne Robinson", Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, March 18, 2005.
28. Wroe, Martin, "A minister of the word", Church Times, 22 June 2012
29. "Biography - Fred Miller Robinson, PhD - College of Arts and Sciences - University of San Diego". www.sandiego.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
30. Sandra Hutchison (15 February 2015). "Marilynne Robinson". Sandra Hutchison. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
31. Fay, Interviewed by Sarah (2008). "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review. Vol. Fall 2008, no. 186. ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
32. Brockes, Emma (2009-05-29). "A life in writing: Marilynne Robinson". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-01-04.
33. "Five books for 2014". The Economist. November 21, 2013.
34. "Jack". US Macmillan. Retrieved September 15, 2020.
35. "Marilynne Robinson Introduced by Paul Elie". 92 St Y.
36. Marchese, David (2024-02-18). "Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God". The New York Times.
37. "PEN/Hemingway Award Winners". The Hemingway Society. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
38. "1982 Finalists". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
39. "The 2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2019-05-21.
40. "2006- Marilynne Robinson". Grawemeyer.org. Archived from the original on 2014-04-04. Retrieved 2015-10-29.
41. "Simmons among nine honorary degree recipients". Brown University. 16 May 2012. Retrieved 28 May 2014.
42. President Obama to Award 2012 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Whitehouse.gov, retrieved 30 June 2013
43. Julie Jackson (September 26, 2013). "Park Kyung-ni literary prize goes to Robinson". Korea Herald. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
44. Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
45. "Marilynne Robinson wins Library of Congress fiction prize". Associated Press. March 29, 2016. Retrieved March 29, 2016.
46. Foundation, Dayton Literary Peace Prize. "Dayton Literary Peace Prize - Marilynne Robinson, 2016 Recipient of the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award". daytonliterarypeaceprize.org.

External links

• Marilynne Robinson on Facebook
• Recognitions by: Marilynne Robinson on her opinion of Marcel Proust, PEN American Center
• Marilynne Robinson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

v t e Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel from 1917–1947
1918–1925	His Family by Ernest Poole (1918) The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1919) The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921) Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1922) One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923) The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (1924) So Big by Edna Ferber (1925)
1926–1950	Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1926; declined) Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927) The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928) Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929) Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930) Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931) The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932) The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933) Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934) Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935) Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937) The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938) The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940) In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942) Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943) Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944) A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947) Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948) Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949) The Way West by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1950)
1951–1975	The Town by Conrad Richter (1951) The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953) A Fable by William Faulkner (1955) Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956) A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958) The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959) Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961) The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962) The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963) The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965) The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966) The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967) The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968) House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969) The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970) Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972) The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973) No award given (1974) The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975)
1976–2000	Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976) No award given (1977) Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978) The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979) The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981) Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982) The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983) Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984) Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986) A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987) Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988) Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989) The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990) Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991) A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992) A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (1993) The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1994) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995) Independence Day by Richard Ford (1996) Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997) American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998) The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1999) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
2001–present	The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001) Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003) The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005) March by Geraldine Brooks (2006) The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2008) Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011) No award given (2012) The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (2013) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014) All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015) The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017) Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018) The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019) The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2020) The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (2021) The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (2022) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver / Trust by Hernan Diaz (2023) Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (2024)

• Biography
• Literature

• 1943 births
• Living people
• 20th-century American novelists
• 21st-century American novelists
• Academics of the University of Kent
• American Congregationalists
• American women novelists
• Pembroke College in Brown University alumni
• Brown University alumni
• Christian novelists
• Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
• Writers from Iowa City, Iowa
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
• University of Iowa faculty
• University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
• University of Washington alumni
• Novelists from Idaho
• People from Sandpoint, Idaho
• National Humanities Medal recipients
• American women essayists
• 20th-century American women writers
• 21st-century American women writers
• Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winners
• PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award winners
• 20th-century American essayists
• 21st-century American essayists
• PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
• Novelists from Massachusetts
• Novelists from Iowa
• American women academics
• Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• National Book Critics Circle Award winners