Annie Proulx
She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards, making her the first woman to receive the prize.[2] Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[3] and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction[4] and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.
Personal life and education[edit]
Proulx was born Edna Ann Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut, to Lois Nellie (née Gill) and Georges-Napoléon Proulx.[5] Her first name honored one of her mother's aunts. She is of English and French-Canadian ancestry.[6][7] Her maternal forebears came to America in 1635, 15 years after the Mayflower arrived.[8]
Proulx lived in multiple states along the East Coast during her childhood as her father worked his way up through the textile industry.[9][10][11] She wrote her first story at the age of 10, while sick with chicken pox.[9] She graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine.[12] She briefly attended Colby College, where she met her first husband, H. Ridgely Bullock, Jr., and dropped out to marry him in 1955.[10] She later returned to college, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in History in 1969. She earned her M.A. in history from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Quebec in 1973.[13] Proulx pursued a PhD at Concordia and passed her oral examinations in 1975, but abandoned her dissertation before completing the degree. In 1999, Concordia awarded her an honorary doctorate.[14]
Proulx lived for more than 30 years in Vermont, has married and divorced three times, and has three sons and a daughter (Jonathan, Gillis, Morgan, and Sylvia). In 1994, she moved to Bird Cloud, a ranch in Saratoga, Wyoming, spending part of the year in northern Newfoundland on a small cove adjacent to L'Anse aux Meadows. As of 2019, Proulx lived in Port Townsend, Washington.[15]
