Life and career

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to an Irish father and an Italian mother, Quindlen graduated in 1970 from South Brunswick High School in South Brunswick, New Jersey and then attended Barnard College from which she graduated in 1974. She is married to prominent New Jersey attorney Gerald Krovatin whom she met while in college.

Quindlen left journalism in 1995 to become a full-time novelist.

In 1999, she joined Newsweek, writing a bi-weekly column until announcing her semi-retirement in the May 18, 2009 issue of the magazine. Quindlen is known as a critic of what she perceives to be the fast-paced and increasingly materialistic nature of modern American life. Much of her personal writing centers on her mother who died at the age of 40 from ovarian cancer, when Quindlen was 19 years old.

She has written five novels, two of which have been made into movies. One True Thing was made into a feature film in 1998 for which Meryl Streep received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Black and Blue and Blessings were made into television movies in 1999 and 2003 respectively.

Quindlen participates in LearnedLeague under the name "QuindlenA".

Criticism

Writing in The New Republic, critic Lee Siegel cited Quindlen as an example of the "monsters of empathy" who "self subjugate and domesticate and assimilate every distant tragedy." He coined the term "The Quindlen Effect" to describe this phenomenon and suggested that it began with her Times column of December 13, 1992, in which Quindlen assailed the four alleged perpetrators of the Glen Ridge rape. "True to her niche," Siegel wrote, "Quindlen attacked with scathing indignation actions that no sane Times reader would ever defend."

In 1999, Villanova University invited Anna Quindlen to deliver the annual commencement address. But once the announcement was made, a group of pro-life students planned a protest against Quindlen’s positions on reproductive rights and she withdrew as speaker. In 2000, however, she spoke at Villanova's graduation.

Works

Nonfiction

• A Quilt of a Country*
• Living Out Loud (1988)
• Thinking Out Loud (1994)
• How Reading Changed My Life (1998)
• Homeless (1998)
• A Short Guide to a Happy Life(2000) ISBN 978-0-375-50461-7 from part of a cancelled commencement address that was to be given at Villanova
• Loud and Clear (2004)
• Imagined London (2004)
• Being Perfect (2005)
• Good Dog. Stay. (2007)
• Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (2012)

Novels

• Object Lessons (1991)
• One True Thing (1994)
• Black and Blue (1998)
• Blessings (2002)
• Rise and Shine (2006)
• Every Last One: A Novel (2010)
• Still Life with Bread Crumbs (2013)
• Miller's Valley (2016)

Children's books

• The Tree That Came To Stay (Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter) (1992)
• Happily Ever After (Illustrated by James Stevenson) (1997)

New table pictorials

• Naked Babies (Photographs by Nick Kelsh) (1996)
• Siblings (Photographs by Nick Kelsh) (1998)

Speeches

• 1999 commencement speech, Mount Holyoke College
• 2000 commencement speech, Villanova University
• 2002 commencement speech, Sarah Lawrence College
• 2006 commencement speech, Colby College
• 2008 commencement speech, Kenyon College
• 2009 commencement speech, Wesleyan University
• 2011 commencement speech, Grinnell College

Awards

Industry awards

• 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary
• 2001 Mothers At Home Media Award
• 2001 Clarion Award for Best Regular Opinion Column in a magazine
• 2002 Clarion Award for Best Opinion Column from the Association for Women in Communications

Honorary degrees

• Dartmouth College
• Denison University
• Grinnell College, May 2011
• Kenyon College, May 2008
• Moravian College
• Mount Holyoke College
• Smith College
• Stevens Institute of Technology
• Nantucket High School
• Penn State
• Villanova University
• Wesleyan University

Other awards from universities

• University Medal of Excellence from Columbia
• Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale
• Victoria Fellow in Contemporary Issues at Rutgers
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Honorary Doctorate from The Pennsylvania State University (Aug.18 2007)

Other awards

• 2006 Amelia Earhart Award from Crittenton Women's Union
• 2016 inductee into the New Jersey Hall of Fame

[ Source: Wikipedia ]