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Marilynne Robinson

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.
This is also the tale of another remarkable vision - not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
ISBN: 0374153892

Marilynne Robinson (1947)

American author Marilynne Robinson was born in 1947 and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College (the former women's college at Brown University), receiving her B.A. in 1966. Marilynne Robinson received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1977.
Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won a PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The second novel, Gilead (2004), won universal acclaim from critics, as well as the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Marilynne Robinson has also written articles and book reviews for Harper’s, the Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review, as well as two works of non-fiction.
Marilynne Robinson has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at numerous universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts. Marilynne Robinson teaches at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.