She married and divorced three times, raised three sons as a single mother, and still found time to write and publish a few short stories every year. In college, she majored in history and later worked toward a doctorate, but eventually abandoned academia to make her living writing magazine articles and how-to books for nearly 20 years. Her mother was a painter and her father a self-made executive in a textile company.Īnnie lived in various towns in New England and in North Carolina during her childhood, and wrote her first short story at age 10, when she was home sick with the chicken pox. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.Annie Proulx, author of celebrated books and stories including The Shipping News and 'Brokeback Mountain,' is born on Augin Norwich, Connecticut. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).Īs the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph-in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs Diddy Shovel the strongman drowned Herald Prowse cane-twirling Beety Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize the much-zippered Alvin Yark silent Wavey and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets.

Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair.features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.

The shipping news author