Her experience in academia-she wrote a Ph.D. In her nonfiction books, as well as in her recent novels, she passionately engages public policy as well as philosophical and theological scholarship. While she is humble about her accomplishments and the acclaim they have brought her, the force of her intellect is apparent. In person, even when clad in her favorite writing attire-a pair of loose pants and a sweatshirt-Robinson carries herself with a regal elegance. Her third novel, Home, came out this fall. Aside from a single short story-“Connie Bronson,” published in The Paris Review in 1986-it wasn’t until 2004 that she returned to fiction with the novel Gilead, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1998, Robinson published a collection of her critical and theological writings, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, which featured reassessments of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Calvin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Her essays and book reviews appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, and in 1989 she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, a scathing examination of the environmental and public health dangers posed by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England-and the political and moral corruption that sustained it. In the interval, Robinson devoted herself to writing nonfiction. Yet it would be more than twenty years before she wrote another novel. The book became a classic, and Robinson was hailed as one of the defining American writers of our time. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration,” wrote Anatole Broyard, with an enthusiasm and awe that was shared by many critics and readers. But an early review in The New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. When Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, she was unknown in the literary world. Interviewed by Sarah Fay Issue 186, Fall 2008
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