Marilynne Robinson was educated at Brown University and the University of Washington. Her novel Housekeeping earned its author the 1982 Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for best first novel, a 1982 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Faulkner fiction award nomination and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Robinson has also published several nonfiction works, including Mother Country: Britain, the Nuclear State, and Nuclear Pollution, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and, most recently, Puritans and Prigs (Holt, 1999).