Despite the all-star cast and excellent story, the film bombed critically and commercially, making back less than a third of its budget. It came in 1997, starring Jason Robards, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jessica Lange. In other words, the movie adaptation was inevitable.

Hollywood does it again: A Thousand Acres was both one of the most critically claimed novels of the early 1990s, and a sweeping family epic. Cather’s books are frequently set in Midwest farming communities ( My Antonia takes place mostly in Nebraska, for instance), and tackle many of the same themes as A Thousand Acres, including gender dynamics and inheritance. Finally, Smiley has praised the novels of Willa Cather, particularly My Antonia (1918). While the plot of Smiley’s book has little to do with Buck’s, their lyrical descriptions of soil and land are remarkably similar. Smiley was also influenced by Pearl Buck’s 1931 opus The Good Earth, which is set in Chinese farmland, and follows a family across multiple generations. Almost every major character in the novel has a direct counterpart in King Lear where Shakespeare tells the story of an elderly king who divides up his kingdom between three daughters, one of whom refuses the gift, Smiley tells the story of a powerful farmer who divides up his land between three daughters, one of whom refuses to accept. She resides in California.Ī Thousand Acres is designed as a modernization of William Shakespeare’s 1606 play King Lear, sometimes called the greatest play (or even the greatest work of literature) ever written. Since 1991, Smiley has published 11 novels, four nonfiction books, and five children’s books. This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, two of the three most prestigious prizes for fiction offered to American novelists (the third is the National Book Award, for which Smiley has been nominated on several occasions). Smiley’s greatest critical and commercial success was A Thousand Acres, published in 1991. The same was the case for Smiley’s next three novels, At Paradise Gate (1991), Duplicate Keys (1984), and The Greenlanders (1988). Smiley had begun working on the novel while she was an MFA student at Iowa it was a critical success, but not a commercial one.

Smiley published her first novel, Blind Barn, in 1980, when she was 31 years old. in 1978, all from the University of Iowa, arguably the most prestigious school for creative writing in the United States. Smiley spent the rest of the decade obtaining a number of degrees in literature and creative writing: an M.A.

She studied English literature at Vassar College, and graduated with a B.A. Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Missouri.

A thousand acres book