Happy 77th Birthday, Marilynne Robinson! (novelist - essayist)

November 26 is the birthday of American novelist Marilynne Robinson, born in Sandpoint, Idaho (1943). She was inspired to write her first book, Housekeeping (1980), while working on a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. She was writing about Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, and began jotting down all the metaphors she noticed. She says: “I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected. I could see that I had created something that implied much more. So I started writing Housekeeping, and the characters became important for me.”

Housekeeping is about two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are cared for by an aunt after their mother commits suicide. The book earned a devoted following and became a surprise best-seller, but Robinson didn’t publish another novel for 24 years. When her second book, Gilead (2004), was published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When asked why it took so long between novels, Robinson answered: “I’m dependent on the emergence of a voice. I can’t make them; they have to come to me. There’s no point in my worrying about it.”

Robinson’s parents were married for 54 years and met at the state fair when they were teenagers. She was a voracious early reader, tearing through Moby-Dick at the age of nine, even though adults in town laughed at her.

Her novels and essays are concerned with faith, philosophy, and the human condition. She once said: “The human situation is beautiful and strange. We are in fact Gilgamesh and Oedipus and Lear. We have achieved this amazing levitation out of animal circumstance by climbing our rope of sand, insight, and error — corrective insight and persistent error. The working of the mind is astonishing and beautiful.”

About writing faith into her novels, Robinson said, “At this point, right across the traditions, there is nothing more valuable to be done than to make people understand that religion is beautiful and it is large.”

Marilynne Robinson’s books include Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and The Givenness of Things (2015).  from "Writer's Almanac" -- American Public Media website (Garrison Keillor)