With a short biography of Dickens, she invited us to see her, like him, as a writer whose work is defined by its energy and range rather than its settings and subject matter. While Robinson was writing “Gilead,” her own Pulitzer winner, and two subsequent novels about Iowa church people and their descendants, Smiley was shaking off the Heartland-Author tag with novels about real estate and tax evasion (“Good Faith”), Hollywood (“Ten Days in the Hills”) and a military wife transplanted from Missouri to San Francisco (“Private Life”). While Robinson, already revered as the author of “Housekeeping,” was taking a long pause from publishing to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Smiley wrote “A Thousand Acres,” a story of an Iowa farm family in extremis that won the Pulitzer Prize. Before Marilynne Robinson’s Iowa, there was Jane Smiley’s.
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