Although Marilynne Robinson’s novels have been her most acclaimed works, her critical essays on topics ranging from environmental disaster to religion have been praised as valuable contributions to life and letters in the United States. Her book The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) explores the contours of modern culture as its ideas have been shaped by thinkers as diverse as John Calvin, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. In an earlier book, Mother Country (1989), Robinson examines the significant physical and environmental damage caused by Sellafield, a nuclear reprocessing plant in Britain. In addition to writing fiction, Robinson frequently contributes essays and reviews to such periodicals as The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review.

Many critics have called Marilynne Robinson a “writer’s writer” for her elegant and hauntingly evocative use of language and for the spiritual force of her stories. Her first novel, Housekeeping, appeared to great critical acclaim in 1980, and writers from Walker Percy to Mary Gordon and Doris Lessing praised it for its richness and variety of tone, its delightful sentences, and its haunting dream of a story. Housekeeping was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and it won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel for 1980 as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Although Robinson produced two books of nonfiction between her first and second novels, twenty-four years passed before she turned her pen to fiction again. In 1989, Mother Country, Robinson’s nonfiction examination of the consequences of pollution at the British nuclear reprocessing plant Sellafield, was a finalist for the National Book Award. When Gilead appeared in 2004, Robinson’s loyal cadre of readers gladly welcomed her return. Critics once again heaped praise on Robinson’s writing, and the novel won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In 2008, her third novel, Home, was named a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.