Biography
Jane Smiley is an American novelist and writer. She was born on 26 September 1949 in Los Angeles, California. She studied literature at Vassar College, where she received a BA in 1971, and at the University of Iowa, where she earned an MA in 1975, an MFA in 1976 and a PhD in 1978.
Smiley taught English at Iowa State University from 1981 to 1996. Her novels include A Thousand Acres (1991), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 and was adapted into a film in 1997, and The Greenlanders (1988). She wrote a teleplay for an episode of the series Homicide: Life on the Street in 1995. Her novella The Age of Grief was adapted into the film The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002). In 2001 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
