About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the modern classic Housekeeping--winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award--and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country (FSG, 1989) and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Reviews

"American culture is enriched by having the whole range of Marilynne Robinson's work" --Jane Vanderburgh, The Boston Globe "A valuable contribution to American life and letters." --Kathleen Norris "A useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit." --Doris Lessing "Robinson's thinking is all in the service of humanity's survival, spiritually and environmentally." --Charles Baxter "One of Robinson's great merits as an essayist is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity." --The New York Times Book Review

"My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in... John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt that the average reader would have read this far." That's the introduction to one essay, but it could also apply to most of Robinson's (Housekeeping) first book in nearly a decade. Among the 10 essays here is one on the idea of wilderness and an intensely personal meditation on growing up Presbyterian, but these are essentially afterthoughts to an impassioned argument against America's contemporary social Darwinists cum free marketeers. And here's where Calvin comes in. She rebuts the characterization of Calvin as protocapitalist and the quick dismissal of his Puritan followers as prigs. Instead, she finds in their example a more fulfilling morality, one that substitutes personal responsibility for contemptuous condemnation of our fellows and a more personal, independent relationship with God and conscience. The corollary of the notion that "our unhappiness is caused by society, is that society can make us happy," she writes, adding, "Whatever else it is, morality is a covenant with oneself, which can only be imposed and enforced by oneself." Though there are occasional problems‘for example, the argument "an important historical `proof' very current among us now is that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence unconscious of the irony of the existence of slavery" is simply a straw man. But for the most part her moral integrity is accompanied by an equally rigorous intellectual integrity, and rather than accepting received wisdom she hunts it out for herself among original texts. In the process, she revives founding beliefs as a possible solution for current ills. (Sept.)

"American culture is enriched by having the whole range of Marilynne Robinson's work" --Jane Vanderburgh, The Boston Globe "A valuable contribution to American life and letters." --Kathleen Norris "A useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit." --Doris Lessing "Robinson's thinking is all in the service of humanity's survival, spiritually and environmentally." --Charles Baxter "One of Robinson's great merits as an essayist is her refusal to take her opinions secondhand. Her book is a goad to renewed curiosity." --The New York Times Book Review