Marilynne Robinson

Robinson grew up in the mountains of Sandpoint, Idaho, in a landscape of lakes and transience that shaped Housekeeping, her spare 1980 debut about two orphaned sisters raised by a drifting aunt. Rapturously reviewed, it was followed by a twenty-four-year silence in fiction, during which she wrote theology and essays and taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Gilead broke that silence in 2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize, opening a cycle of novels (Home, Lila, and Jack among them) that circle the same small Iowa town and its intertwined families from different vantage points. Her fiction draws on her lifelong study of Calvinist theology, and she has defended John Calvin himself in essays against his popular caricature.

A practicing Congregationalist, she was invited by Barack Obama for a widely read published conversation on faith and American life during his presidency.