ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1955, Barbara Kingsolver spent her youth not only in the United States (in eastern Kentucky) but also in the Congo. Unlike the characters of her novel The Poisonwood Bible, however, Kingsolver says she remained largely unaware of the greater historical drama swirling within and around her at the time. When she lived again in America, she graduated from DePauw University as a biology major. She would become a science writer for the University of Arizona (and, in fact, much of her non-fiction writing focuses on life sciences). She publisher her first novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988; and her most popular work to date, The Poisonwood Bible, ten years later.
Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that “the reader is made to understand not only the ways in which a father's sins are visited upon (and expiated by) his children, but also the ways in which private lives can be shaped and shattered by public events.” The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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