American · b. 1943
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2005 for Gilead), Orange Prize for Fiction (2009 for Home)
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist whose Gilead sequence — four novels set in a small Iowa town — is widely considered among the finest achievements in contemporary American fiction.
Marilynne Robinson published her debut novel Housekeeping in 1980 to immediate critical acclaim. It is one of the most formally accomplished American novels of its era — prose of extraordinary beauty in service of a story about transience, grief, and the limits of domesticity — and it announced a writer of the first order. Then Robinson did not publish another novel for twenty-four years. In the interim she wrote essays, taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and thought carefully about American history, Calvinist theology, and the relationship between religious faith and democratic culture.
When Gilead appeared in 2004, it was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. The novel takes the form of a letter written by an ageing Congregationalist minister in Iowa to the young son he will not live to see grow up. It won the Pulitzer Prize and inaugurated a sequence of four novels — Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack — that together constitute one of the most sustained and serious novelistic projects in contemporary American literature. Each novel revisits the same small Iowa town and the same cluster of characters from a different angle, and each adds something the others could not provide: Gilead is about mortality and inheritance; Home is about failure and forgiveness; Lila is about poverty and grace; Jack is about race and love.
Robinson is openly and seriously religious in a literary culture that tends to treat faith with condescension or embarrassment, and this sets her apart. Her novels take Christian theology as a genuine intellectual framework — not as backdrop or metaphor, but as the actual terms in which her characters think — and this gives them a density of moral seriousness that is rare in contemporary fiction. She has described herself as a Calvinist, and the Calvinist emphasis on the weight of human fallenness and the mystery of grace runs through everything she has written.
by Marilynne Robinson
John Ames, a seventy-six-year-old Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa in 1956, knowing he is dying, writes a long letter to his young son — a letter about faith, memory, his father and grandfather, and the complicated situation of his old friend's son John Ames Boughton.
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by Marilynne Robinson
Two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, grow up in the small lakeside town of Fingerbone after their mother drives into the lake, looked after by a succession of unsuitable relatives, until their drifting aunt Sylvie arrives.
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by Marilynne Robinson
The third Gilead novel tells the story of John Ames's young wife — the drifter Lila, who grew up in poverty on the American roads, cared for by the woman Doll who stole her as an infant — and how she came to arrive in Gilead and sit down in the back of an old preacher's church.
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by Marilynne Robinson
The companion novel to Gilead retells the same events from the perspective of John Ames's friend Robert Boughton and his prodigal son Jack — who comes home after twenty years of absence bearing a secret that would destroy his father's world.
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by Marilynne Robinson
Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher, meet in St. Louis in the late 1940s and fall in love in a state where their relationship is illegal.
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Marilynne Robinson's complete bibliography in order — from Gilead and Housekeeping to Lila and Jack. Best starting points for the Gilead series and new readers.
guide
Where to start with Marilynne Robinson — whether to begin with Gilead, Housekeeping, or Lila. A complete reading guide to Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novels.
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