Ann Beattie
| Ann Beattie | |
|---|---|
in April 2006
|
|
| Born |
September 8, 1947 Washington, D.C. |
| Occupation | Short story writer, Novelist, Professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Literary |
Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.
Born in Washington, D.C., Beattie grew up in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C. and attended Woodrow Wilson High School.
She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in The Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. Critics have praised her writing for its keen observations and dry, matter-of-fact irony which chronicle disillusionments of the upper-middle-class generation that grew up in the 1960s. In 1976, she published her first book of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which was later made into a film.
Beattie's style has evolved over the years. In 1998, she published Park City, a collection of old and new short stories, about which Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote in the New York Times:
[The stories] are arranged chronologically, which allows the reader to trace the development of the author's technique. It also lets one see the contrast between the latest stories and the earliest, an experience of sufficient subtlety and complexity to reduce one in this limited space to the following gross generalizations: Gone is the deadpan style of the early and middle stories, in which Ms. Beattie lays out on a dissecting table the behavior of her disaffected post-counterculture yuppies and then leaves it up to the reader to do the anatomizing. Gone, too, are the stabs of lyricism of the middle period, particularly the endings that try poetically to recapitulate the story's action but feel tacked on and artificial. .. In the best of these stories, Ms. Beattie's ability both to commit herself and to knit her commitment into the finest needlework of her artistry contrasts sharply with the irritating moral passivity of her earlier work.
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Wikipedia