Anna Quindlen
(b. 1953)

In her college application essay, Anna Quindlen wrote that her goal in life was to write the great American novel. To support herself while she wrote fiction, she took a summer job as a reporter with a hometown newspaper when she was 18. Later that year, she entered Barnard College in New York City and became a part-time reporter for the New York Post. After graduating college in 1974, she began a long and successful career as a reporter, never imagining that journalism would lead her to a Pulitzer Prize and national recognition as one of America's most noted columnists. However, despite her numerous awards and recognition—including honorary doctoral degrees from Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Moravian, and Smith Colleges—fiction continues to be Quindlen's first love.

Quindlen's first success as a fiction writer came during her senior year at college when she sent a short story to Seventeen Magazine. Expecting a letter of rejection, she received a check instead. After graduating college, she got a job with the New York Times and worked her way up from general assignment reporter to columnist. In 1983, she was promoted to deputy metropolitan editor. Quindlen wanted to leave journalism on several occasions after she married and had children, but the Times did not want to lose her and offered her a column, "Life in the 30s," which focused on everyday topics that she could write at home. In 1990, she began the nationally syndicated column Public and Private and won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary two years later. She published Thinking Out Loud, a collection of her columns, in 1993.

In 1995, Quindlen finally left journalism to become a full-time novelist and author of three critically acclaimed bestsellers, Object Lessons (1991), One True Thing (1994), and Black and Blue (1998). After a four-year absence from her artful trade, she returned to journalism in 1999 when Newsweek magazine offered her the prestigious "Last Word" column on the back page of the publication. Quindlen's latest novel, Blessings, was published in 2002.

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E  |  F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J  |  K  |  L  |  M
N  |  O  |  P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T  |  U  |  V  |  W  |  X  |  Y  |  Z