Publication Order of Gilead Books
| Gilead | 2004 |
| Home | 2008 |
| Lila | 2014 |
| Jack | 2020 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Housekeeping | 1980 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution | 1989 |
| The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought | 1998 |
| Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self | 2010 |
| When I Was a Child I Read Books | 2012 |
| The Givenness of Things | 2015 |
| What Are We Doing Here? | 2018 |
| Reading Genesis | 2024 |
| On Faith and Freedom of Thought | 2026 |
About Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist, born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on 26 November 1943. She is best known for her first novel, “Housekeeping” (1980), and for “Gilead” (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 and began a sequence of four linked novels set in a small Iowa town.
Born Marilynne Summers, she grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and studied at Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, graduating in 1966. She received a PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977. She wrote “Housekeeping” in the late 1970s, working in the evenings while her two sons slept. Narrated by Ruthie, it tells how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Bill Forsyth directed a film adaptation released in 1987.
Twenty-four years passed before her second novel. “Gilead” takes the form of a long letter written in 1956 by John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist minister with a failing heart, to his seven-year-old son. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Home” (2008) and “Lila” (2014) return to the Ames and Boughton families during the same period: “Home” won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction and “Lila” won the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Jack” followed in 2020.
Her non-fiction began with “Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution” (1989), which was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her essays, collected in volumes from “The Death of Adam” (1998) to “What Are We Doing Here?” (2018), range across religion and science, American history and John Calvin. “Reading Genesis” appeared in 2024, and in 2026 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published “On Faith and Freedom of Thought”, the text of her Jon Fosse Lecture.
Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1991 until she retired in 2016. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2012 and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. In 2015 The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between her and President Barack Obama.
Photo: Christian Scott Heinen Bell, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).