Ellen Foster
by Kaye Gibbons
List Price: $9.00
Pages: 126
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 067972866X
Publisher: Vintage
Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina in 1960. She graduated
from Rocky Mount High School and continued her education at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at Chapel Hill, she wrote her
first novel, Ellen Foster, which reviewers and fans praised as
an extraordinary debut. Eudora Welty said that "the honesty of thought
and eye and feeling and word mark the work of this talented writer." Ellen
Foster went on to win the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from
the Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as numerous other awards. The
book has been widely translated and has gained wide course adoption.
Her second novel, A Virtuous
Woman, was published in 1989 and also received wide praise in the
United States and abroad. The San Francisco Chronicle called the
book "a perfect little gem."
In 1989, Gibbons received
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel,
A Cure for Dreams, which was published in 1991. This novel won
the 1990/PEN Revson Award for the best work of fiction published by a
writer under 35, as well as the Heartland Prize for Fiction from The
Chicago Tribune and the North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award.
Her fourth book, Charms
for the Easy Life, was published in March 1993. It was a New York
Times bestseller and prompted a Time magazine review to say,
"Some people might give up their second-born to write as well as Kaye
Gibbons." Her fifth book, Sights Unseen, was also a national bestseller.
In 1996, Kaye Gibbons was the youngest writer ever to receive the Chevalier
de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a French knighthood recognizing her
contribution to French literature.
Her next novel, On the
Occasion of My Last Afternoon, will be published in the summer of
1998. Gibbons lives in North Carolina with her family.
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