Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout was born in January 6, 1956 she was brought up in New Hampshire and Maine small towns. She has graduated from Bates College and spent a year in Oxford, England; she has also studied at law school for another year. She graduated with honors, from the “Syracuse University College of Law” and a Certificate of Gerontology from the “Syracuse School of Social Work” in 1982. In the same year her first story was published in New Letters magazine. She then moved to New York City and continued to write stories that were published in literary magazines, as well as in Redbook and Seventeen.

“Amy and Isabelle”, was her first book and it took her seven years to write, after publication the book was select for the year 2000 “Orange Prize” and was also nominated for the 2000 “PEN/Faulkner Award” for fiction. She was a “National Endowment for the Humanities” professor at Colgate University during the Fall Semester of 2007, where she taught creative writing at both the introductory and advanced level.

In 2006 she wrote “Abide with Me” then in the year 2008 she wrote a book by the name of “Olive Kitteridge” fiction. In this story of the book there is the hero or the title character lying on her son’s bed after her outdoor wedding, listening to her new daughter in law through the window making fun of the “Olives” dress she has chosen to wear for the wedding. On the other hand there is the child who, whose mother took off, believes that her father has been granted the “soul custody” of her and there is the intelligence, all the way through, that flatten the misery and when the character “Rebecca” assumes, “This can’t be my life” the opportunity, “that inner shaking that makes you moves forward”, can signal when it is slightest anticipated.

Though the book is being advertised as “a novel in stories”, in my opinion it is not a novel. As an example “Sherwood Anderson’s” classic “Winesburg, Ohio”, is the book in which a united sequence of delicately experiential stories centering the characters live in a single town but in “Olive Kitteridge” case the location is Crosby, Maine.

The story goes something like this “Olive and Henry” the two characters of this story have one child, an adult son named as, “Christopher”. Olive and Henry build a house for their son near their own when he returns from “Podiatry School”. His parents hope that “Christopher” will marry with a local woman and give them grandchildren, but the woman he marries is a “beast”, in Olive’s opinion convince Christopher to move to San Francisco before divorcing Christopher soon after, “Olive” is happy to think that now her son will move back home, but “Christopher” decides to be in California, and this break his mother’s heart, for Olive, this is like someone has rocked a lobster slamming her in the breastbone”.

“Olive Kitteridge”, is the set of linked stories about a bad-tempered, school teacher in a coastal town in Maine, author, Elizabeth Strout, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction is the work of a very mature writer who has many things to express in her future books.

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout