Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist.
ولدت مارلين عام 1943 وهي روائية امريكية وكاتبة مقال
Biography
Robinson (née Summers) was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.
ولت وترعرت في ايداهو وحصلت على الشهادة الاولى كما حصلت على الدكتوراه في اللغة الانجليزية من جامعة واشنطن عام 1977
Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.
She is also the author of non fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) and Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010). She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.
She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts' MFA Program for Poets & Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, giving a series of talks entitled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2011 Robinson delivered Oxford University's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Iowa City.
Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister.
Awards
· 1980: Housekeeping - Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
· 2004: Gilead - 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; 2005 Ambassador Book Award
· 2006: The recipient of the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
· 2008: Home - 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction; finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.
Collected Works
Novels
· Housekeeping (1980)
· Gilead (2004)
· Home (2008)

Nonfiction
· Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989)
· The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)
· Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010)
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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Marilynne Robinson (page 2)

Born Marilynne Summers in the town of Sandpoint, Idaho, on 26 November 1943, Robinson was influenced by her family 's pioneer heritage, for her paternal great-grandparents had traveled in covered wagons to northern Idaho and had settled in the area.
Her parents, Ellen Harris Summers and John J. Summers, raised their daughter and her brother, David, in Sandpoint, Sagle, Coolin, and other towns and villages near the forests of northern Idaho and western Washington, where John Summers worked for various lumber companies.
كانت في طفولتها تعيش مع عائلتها قرب الغابات حيث عمل والدها مع عدد من شركات الاخشاب

Most of these towns are situated on or near the shores of beautiful, large lakes—Lake Pend Oreille, Priest Lake, and Lake Coeur d'Alene—surrounded by forested hills and mountains. Everywhere Robinson lived as a child, natural beauty beckoned almost at her doorstep. Several of the towns she grew up in also serve as switching yards or stopping points for railroads, and long railroad bridges cross the lakes near the towns.
In “My Western Roots,” an essay included in Old West—New West: Centennial Essays (1993), Robinson says of her reading as a child and her education at Coeur d'Alene High School: “I find that the hardest work in the world—it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.” She explains the probable reason for such misunderstanding:
Idaho society at that time at least seemed to lack the sense of social class which elsewhere makes culture a system of signs and passwords, more or less entirely without meaning except as it identifies group and subgroup.
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Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
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A love letter to lost America
Marilynne Robinson made fans wait 24 years for her second novel. Talking
كتبت روايتها الثانية بعد 24 سنة

If there is a singular refutation of F Scott Fitzgerald's self-lacerating verdict that 'there are no second acts in American lives', it must be the career of Marilynne Robinson. In 1981, she made her debut with Housekeeping , a haunting, lyrical tale of two sisters set in the wilderness of the American north west, quite unlike anything else published at that time.
There's something rather English about Robinson when she utters such sentiments, but she was brought up in the woods of the far north west, Idaho and Montana, by a family who appear to have turned their backs on ranching to go into the lumber business.
Her parents were 'not very churchy people... but I had the feeling of growing up in a religious environment about which nothing was said'. If there was any explicit religion it came from her grandfather, who was an elder in the Presbyterian church. 'My grandparents both went about their lives with this sort of humming or singing.'
This childhood gave her a lifelong love of the Bible, and she speaks affectionately of Genesis, Exodus and the Book of Ruth, which has, she admits, 'influenced me inordinately. The Ruth-Boaz relationship seems to be what I wrote about in Gilead '.
That's not the whole story. Her childhood reading was steeped in British and American classics: The Little House on the Prairie, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, the collected works of Poe, Melville and Dickens. 'It was like some sort of flywheel in my brain as soon as I started reading Dickens: "I've got to write something!" And that was wonderful.'
She also learned Latin and is grateful for the way it grounded her sentences. 'I would have to count Cicero among my influences,' she says, laughing at her absurdity. Her prose flows from these classical sources, at once simple and rich, musical but unadorned. 'Writing has always felt like praying,' says one of her characters, expressing the book's mood.
She had a lot of encouragement to write from her family and found poetic inspiration in storms. 'I felt I had to write poetry if there was a thunderstorm. Then I got old enough to realise I was writing really bad poems. That made a prose writer out of me overnight.'
كانت تشعر انها تحتاج لكتتب اذا سمعت الرعد
Asked about the 24-year hiatus between first and second novels, Robinson explains that Gilead was written very quickly but still speaks of the need she felt to re-evaluate the assumptions of fiction. Out of the blue, I find myself asking: 'Do you think of yourself as a writer?'
'That's an interesting question I think maybe I don't in the way that other people I know do. I've always been creative, but you can't assume a role without falsification. Even if the role is indistinguishable from your identity, you can't do it. That frightening to me.'
Admirers of Robinson will be glad to know she's about to take a sabbatical from Iowa and 'can't wait' to get started on some new writing. She knows what it's to be about but, concludes, with more mischievous laughter: 'I'm not telling
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Home" and "Gilead" both dealt with the spiritual graspings of fathers and sons. In "Housekeeping", about two lonely girls wading through a doomed adolescence, real maternal figures were absent as well. I ask if Robinson ever intended to write about mothers and sons (she has two, now grown-up). "One of the pleasures, for me at least, of writing fiction is that you can put things at a distance. If I'm writing too close to myself, I feel like something is about to go wrong. Like I'm defending myself. I prefer the idea--even if it's an illusion--that you can reach a level of objectivity, that it doesn't have your handprints all over it."