Annie Proulx

It's the birthday of American novelist Annie Proulx (1935), who won the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, The Shipping News (1993).

She even traded one story for a canoe when the magazine didn't have enough to pay her.


"I'm not a person who works well with others. Having to get along with people you don't respect very much, having to deal with a bureaucracy, just the whole weight of idiots turned me off."

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."