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An American original, E. Annie Proulx wins Library of Congress prize
E. Annie Proulx wants her characters to join her in accepting the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction when the award is presented Sept. 1 at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Who then would join the author at the ceremony?
Unimportant people poor people plagued with bad luck, financial and personal troubles. They were hill farmers, small town country music groups, hunters and fisherman, immigrants and accordion repairmen, failed newspapermen, war veterans and cowhands, closeted rural gays in denial, ranchers, lumbermen, woodchoppers, widows, Proulx said.
The characters, she says, were strung across the continent from Newfoundland to Vermont to Louisiana to Wyoming to Michigan to Oregon. They are as real as history.
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, in a press statement, said she selected Proulx, who was born in Connecticut and lives in Washington state, as this year s winner based on the recommendation of authors, literary critics and a jury of previous winners.
E. Annie Proulx has given us monumental sagas and keen-eyed, skillfully wrought stories, Hayden stated. Throughout her writing, she succeeds in capturing the wild, wooly heart of America, from its screwball wit to its every last detail. She is an American original.
Proulx is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Shipping Newsand the short story Brokeback Mountain, winner of the O. Henry Prize and later adapted by Ang Lee into an Academy Award-winning film. Brokeback Mountain a remarkable story about a relationship between two men, a way of life in the American west and homophobia felt revolutionary.
First published in The New Yorker in 1997, the story appeared under the subhead Cowboys and horses and long, lonely nights in the wilderness. The story began, They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.
The Prize for American Fiction is the Library of Congress most prestigious award, presented in prior years to Louis Erdich, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende, among others.
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