Library Lions 2009

Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx, who was born in Norwich, Connecticut, has led a peripatetic life and traveled extensively. She learned to read when she was four years old, and soon after was taken to the local library, one built with funding from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, where she discovered that the fabulous riches of books were available to everyone. Ms. Proux planned to read all the books in that first library. Wherever she lived, she knew how to get to the library and every week dragged home, sometimes literally, a box of books. One of the high points of her childhood in rural Vermont was the visit of the bookmobile, a library on wheels, from which one could borrow books and keep them until the bookmobile’s return.

Ms. Proulx began writing when she was in her 50s and has won many literary awards, including the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize, both for The Shipping News, and the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Postcards. She currently divides her life and work between Wyoming and New Mexico; her interests include history, archaeology, geology, and literature. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Ms. Proulx is working on a memoir about conservation efforts at Bird Cloud, the Wyoming home she shares with her four children.

“Libraries have been entwined throughout my life….For me, libraries supplied a lifetime of learning and pleasure and taught me how to write.”