Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx’s first publication in The New Yorker, in 1997, was the story “Brokeback Mountain,” a depiction of reluctant love between two ranch hands in Wyoming in the nineteen-sixties, which inspired not only an Academy Award-winning movie but an opera, by Charles Wuorinen, for which Proulx wrote the libretto. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, for her 1993 novel “The Shipping News”; the National Book Award; and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, among other honors, Proulx is an aficionado of the American vernacular. She has rooted much of her work in the Atlantic Northeast and in the Western states. (She has published three volumes of “Wyoming Stories”: “Close Range,” “Bad Dirt,” and “Fine Just the Way It Is.”) She allows us to hear the sometimes stubbornly inexpressive voices of the people who work the land, the cattle, the truck stops, the fishing boats, the oil rigs, the rodeos, the bars, or the old-age homes of Wyoming, Oklahoma, or Texas. Whether they inhabit the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, many of her characters fight on the front lines of a battle with nature, or defend themselves and the natural world against systems that are entirely ignorant of their existence. In Proulx’s depictions of the hardships of frontier life, there are displays of bitter irony but also moments of genuine sweetness and hard-won emotion. Through small, sometimes comic incidents, as well as through portrayals of the larger forces of culture and of history, she reminds us of the myriad lives that have been lived, lost, and forgotten in the creation and the continuity of this country.