Marilynne Robinson

Who Is Marilynne Robinson?

Marilynne Robinson is the most significant American novelist writing from within a confessional Christian tradition today — and arguably the most significant American novelist of her generation, full stop. Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, she was educated at Pembroke College (Brown University) and the University of Washington, where she earned her doctorate. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), established her as a major literary voice with its haunting account of transience, loss, and two sisters finding different responses to the same wound.

But it was Gilead (2004), written twenty-four years later, that defined her achievement. The novel is structured as a long letter written by the elderly Congregationalist minister John Ames to his young son — a letter the son will read when his father is dead. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it is, by any measure, one of the finest American novels of the twenty-first century: a sustained meditation on mortality, grace, forgiveness, and the beauty of the ordinary world seen through the eyes of a man who has spent his life attending to it.

Robinson is also a distinguished essayist whose collections — The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, When I Was a Child I Read Books, The Givenness of Things — defend the Calvinist tradition against its detractors and argue for the compatibility of serious religious faith with serious intellectual life. She taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work represents, at the highest level of literary achievement, the conviction that Christian faith is not a retreat from reality but a more careful attention to it.

In Her Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Housekeeping (1980) — novel
• Gilead (2004) — Pulitzer Prize
• Home (2008) — National Book Award finalist
• Lila (2014) — National Book Award finalist
• Jack (2020)
• The Death of Adam (1998) — essays
• The Givenness of Things (2015) — essays