Happy Birthday, Marilynn Robinson (novelist-essayist)!

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, American Public Media):

Saturday, November 26 is the 68th birthday of writer Marilynne Robinson, born in Sandpoint, Idaho (1943). Although she is often known as the novelist who took a 23-year break between her award-winning, critically acclaimed novels, Housekeeping and Gilead -- and then only four more before her third, Home, a companion to Gilead -- she has published as many books of nonfiction as novels. Her essays are polemical, in sharp contrast to her fiction, upbraiding the British government for environmental degradation in her first nonfiction book, lamenting the "empty" state of contemporary discourse in her second, and, in 2010, waxing philosophical on the science versus religion debate in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.She said: "I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It's a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book."