Marilynne Robinson '66 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday for "Gilead," her elegiac novel about a dying Congregationalist priest in Iowa as he relates his life in a letter to his young son.
Robinson becomes the third alum in as many years to win the award in letters or drama.
Boston Globe reporter Gareth Cook '91 also won a Pulitzer this year, in explanatory journalism for his coverage on the "complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research," according to the prize's Web site.
The Pulitzer board praised his "clarity and humanity" in covering the politically charged issue. Cook graduated with degrees in mathematical physics and international relations, was named to the Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa honor societies and intended to join the foreign service before deciding to become a journalist, according to his biography on the prize's Web site. He could not be reached for comment.
Robinson, 61, is a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She previously taught at Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Kent in England. Her first novel, "Housekeeping", was published more than two decades ago.
During that time, Robinson wrote essays for Harper's and the Paris Review, among other magazines. Commenting on everything from Calvinism to Freud to evolutionary biology, her 1998 collection "Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought" was critically acclaimed for its depth and breadth.
"She has a curious mind," said Forrest Gander, director of the program in literary arts. "Like Brown's open curriculum, which fosters cross-disciplinary freedom, Marilynne's work in the past has dealt with seeing connections."
It is this commitment to thought at its quietest and most reflective that seems to have won critics over with "Gilead," which had previously won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Preoccupied with religion and the ideological polarity that exists in America, "Gilead" has been praised as a departure from the sensationalism that populates much of today's literary landscape.
"(Robinson's) work has a glow of intense burning that keeps lit in the midst of the firecrackers going off all around her," Gander said. "These firecrackers don't really heat anybody. She's more concerned with the glow that takes place in the dark of your soul."
Born in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1947, Robinson's writing reflects her appreciation for the quiet and her commitment to the natural. Gander, who worked with Robinson at Iowa, remembered "taking long walks" through the campus and simply "talking about very serious things."
"She is a fierce moralist," Gander said. "She manages to find a form that almost aggregates, slowly taking shape. Her mind is a mind that makes adventures."
Robinson and Cook are just two of many Brown professors and alums who have been successful in capturing major literary awards in recent years.
"Two programs really stand out in the country: Iowa's and Brown's. Iowa's tends to be more mainstream while Brown continues to produce some of the most innovative and important writers today," Gander said.
In 2003, Jeffrey Eugenides '83 won the fiction award for his novel, "Middlesex," a family saga of Greek immigrants in Detroit. Cuban-born playwright Nilo Cruz M.F.A. '94 won the award for drama that same year for "Anna in the Tropics." The Depression-era play set in Florida deals with the lives of Cuban cigar workers affected by Tolstoy's classic, "Anna Karenina."
Literary Arts Professor Paula Vogel won the 1998 Pulitzer for Drama for "How I Learned to Drive."
Officially administered by Columbia University, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is awarded annually to American authors for exemplary works of fiction. First awarded in 1917, past fiction winners include William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri.
