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(April 8, 1955–)

Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, but spent most of her childhood in eastern Kentucky. In 1977, she graduated, magna cum laude, from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, with a degree in biology, then earned an M.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona in 1981. After graduate school, Kingsolver worked at the University of Arizona as a technical writer and, later, worked as a freelance journalist, writing for magazines ranging from
Redbook
to
Smithsonian.
She is married to musician and biologist Steven Hopp and has two daughters.

Beset with insomnia while pregnant with her first child, Kingsolver spent her nights writing what became her first novel,
The Bean Trees.
On the day she brought her daughter home from the hospital, she got a phone call from New York with the news that her manuscript had been accepted for publication.

The Bean Trees
received glowing reviews. Margaret Randall, in
The Women's Review of Books
, said the story was “propelled by a marvelous ear, a fast-moving humor and the powerful undercurrent of human struggle.” Jack Butler in the
New York Times Book Review
felt the novel was “as richly connected as a fine poem, but reads like realism.” Subsequent Kingsolver novels, as well as collections of short stories and essays, have been equally well received. In 2000, President Clinton awarded Kingsolver the National Humanities Medal.

Themes which run through Kingsolver's work include the tension between individualism and one's need for community, the search for justice in an often unjust world, and the need for reconciliation between humans and the natural world.

“The natural history and culture of southern Appalachia were the most appealing and defining elements of my childhood,” says Kingsolver. “Southern Appalachia remains the region that feels like home to me, and although I've lived and worked in Arizona for twenty years, my family now spends a large part of each year back ‘home' in southern Appalachia. To my mind, it's the only place on earth where the birds sound right, and people do too.”

The opening scene of
The Bean Trees
introduces the reader to Missy Greer (who soon changes her name to Taylor Greer) a Kentucky high school student who's determined to escape the sort of life many of her classmates have heedlessly embraced.

The narrator in the scene from
Prodigal Summer
is Deanna Wolfe, a biologist who's employed as a United States Forest Service ranger in the Appalachian highlands. She has just encountered a hunter named Eddie Bondo who has asked her to accompany him on the trail.

Novels:
Prodigal Summer
(2000),
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
(1998),
Pigs in Heaven
(1993),
Animal Dreams
(1991),
The Bean Trees
(1988).
Nonfiction:
Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands
(2002)
Small Wonder
(2002),
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
(1995),
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
(1989).
Poetry:
Another America/Otra America
(1992).
Short stories:
Homeland and Other Stories
(1989).

Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 134, 284–89. “Messing with the Sacred: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver,” [transcription of KET, The Kentucky Network's 1997
Signature: Barbara Kingsolver
program, produced & directed by Guy Mendes],
Appalachian Journal
28:3 (spring 2001), 304–24. Amy Pense, “Barbara Kingsolver” [Interview],
Poets & Writers Magazine
(July/August 1993), 14–21. Meredith Sue Willis, “Barbara Kingsolver, Moving On,”
Appalachian Journal
22:1 (fall 1994), 78–86.

from Chapter One, The One to Get Away

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what Newt's whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future.

My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. But that was the general idea.

Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you could have pegged us for brother and sister. And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can't say we weren't, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides. But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet. You couldn't have said, anyway, which one would stay right where he was, and which would be the one to get away.

Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but
Miss
Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward. Miss Marietta and later on just Missy.

The thing you have to understand is, it was just like Mama to do that. When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of bluegills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I'd caught the famous big lunker in Shep's Lake that old men were always chewing their tobacco and thinking about. “That's my big girl bringing home the bacon,” she would say, and cook those things and serve them up like Thanksgiving for the two of us.

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you'd see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.

By the time I was in high school and got my first job and all the rest, including the whole awful story about Newt Hardbine which I am about to tell you, he was of course not in school anymore. He was setting tobacco alongside his half-crippled daddy and by that time had gotten a girl in trouble, too, so he was married. It was Jolene Shanks and everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him. Nobody expected any better of a Hardbine.

But I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife. Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.

It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event. Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the way-side like seeds off a poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize. You'd made it that far. By senior year there were maybe two boys to every one of us, and we believed it was our special reward when we got this particular science teacher by the name of Mr. Hughes Walter.

Now
him.
He came high-railing in there like some blond Paul McCartney, sitting on the desk in his tight jeans and his clean shirt sleeves rolled up just so, with the cuffs turned in. He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home, all full of their darns and mends. Hughes Walter was no Kentucky boy. He was from out of state, from some city college up north, which was why, everyone presumed, his name was backwards.

Not that I was moony over him, at least no more than the standard of the day, which was plain to see from the walls of the girls' bathroom. You could have painted a barn with all the lipstick that went into “H.W. enraptured forever” and things of that kind. This is not what I mean. But he changed my life, there is no doubt.

He did this by getting me a job. I had never done anything more interesting for a living than to help Mama with the for-pay ironing on Sundays and look after the brats of the people she cleaned for. Or pick bugs off somebody's bean vines for a penny apiece. But this was a real job at the Pittman County Hospital, which was one of the most important and cleanest places for about a hundred miles. Mr. Walter had a wife, Lynda, whose existence was ignored by at least the female portion of the high school but who was nevertheless alive and well, and was in fact one of the head nurses. She asked Hughes Walter if there was some kid in his classes that could do odd jobs down there after school and on Saturdays, and after graduation maybe it could work out to be a full-time thing, and he put the question to us just like that.

Surely, you'd think he would have picked one of the Candy Stripers, town girls with money for the pink-and-white uniforms and prissing around the bedpans on Saturdays like it was the holiest substance on God's green earth they'd been trusted to carry. Surely you would think he'd pick Earl Wickentot, who could dissect an earthworm without fear. That is what I told Mama on the back porch. Mama in her armhole apron in the caned porch chair and me on the stepstool, the two of us shelling out peas into a newspaper.

“Earl Wickentot my hind foot” is what Mama said. “Girl, I've seen you eat a worm whole when you were five. He's no better than you are, and none of them Candy Stripers either.” Still, I believed that's who he would choose, and I told her so.

She went to the edge of the porch and shook a handful of pea hulls out of her apron onto the flowerbed. It was marigolds and Hot Tamale cosmos. Both Mama and I went in for bright colors. It was a family trait. At school it was a piece of cake to pick me out of a lineup of town girls in their beige or pink Bobbie Brooks matching sweater-and-skirt outfits. Medgar Biddle, who was once my boyfriend for three weeks including the homecoming dance, used to say that I dressed like an eye test. I suppose he meant the type they give you when you go into the army, to see if you're color blind, not the type that starts with the big E. He said it when we were breaking up, but I was actually kind of flattered. I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.

Mama settled back into the cane chair and scooped up another apronful of peas. Mama was not one of these that wore tight jeans to their kids' softball games. She was older than that. She had already been through a lot of wild times before she had me, including one entire husband by the name of Foster Greer. He was named after Stephen Foster, the sweet-faced man in the seventh-grade history book who wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” but twenty-two years after naming him that, Foster Greer's mother supposedly died of a broken heart. He was famous for drinking Old Grand Dad with a gasoline funnel, and always told Mama never to pull anything cute like getting pregnant. Mama says trading Foster for me was the best deal this side of the Jackson Purchase.

She snapped about three peas to every one of mine. Her right hand twisted over and back as she snapped a little curl of string off the end of each pod and rolled out the peas with her thumb.

“The way I see it,” she said, “a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow. You, me, Earl Wickentot, the President of the United States, and even God Almighty, as far as I can see. The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.”

I didn't say anything for a while, and then I told her I would ask Mr. Walter for the job.

There wasn't any sound but Henry Biddle using a hay mower on his front yard, down the road, and our peas popping open to deliver their goods out into the world.

She said, “Then what? What if he don't know you're good enough for it?

I said, “I'll tell him. If he hasn't already given it to a Candy Striper.”

Mama smiled and said, “Even if.”