22 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988)Barbara Kingsolver was born in Maryland, 8 April 1955, and raised in rural Car-
lisle, Kentucky. She began her studies at DePauw University as a music major but
switched to biology before graduating magna cum laude, in 1977. After living in
France for a time, she returned to the United States and studied at the University
of Arizona, where she earned a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biol-
ogy in 1981, after which she did additional graduate work in her field.
Kingsolver has established herself as a writer with an engaging, homey voice
that attracts many readers, as well as a writer passionately invested in social-
justice issues. In 1999 she used the advance for one of her books to establish the
Bellwether Prize to advocate literary fiction that addresses issues of social justice.
Awarded in even-numbered years, the prize consists of a cash award of $25,000
to the author and publication by a major publisher. In 2000 Kingsolver received
the National Humanities Medal for being “a leading voice for human rights,
social responsibility and the environment in contemporary American fiction.”
Kingsolver’s 2008 nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,
written with her husband, Steven L. Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver,
argues for the necessity of sustainable agricultural practices, recounting a year in
which the family vowed to eat only food they grew themselves or could obtain
locally. In her two volumes of essays, High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Won-
der (2002), she writes of domestic joys and travails alongside national and inter-
national political issues, such as 9/11 and nuclear disarmament, often alternating
between the two within one essay to make the same kind of statement that
characterizes her fiction: the local and the global are inextricably intertwined,
and our seemingly individual acts have implications well beyond our personal
lives. Her writing has been published in sixty-five countries and translated into
twenty-three languages.
Kingsolver clearly inherited some of her strong sense of social justice from
her father, who took the family to the Congo for several months and later to St.
Lucia in the Caribbean in order to donate his services as a medical doctor. These
experiences gave her an expanded vision of the world and the varied circum-
stances in which people may live. She began writing a novel while suffering from
insomnia during her first pregnancy; negotiations for publication of the work
were going on while she was in labor, and she signed her contract with Harper
& Row the day she came home from the hospital. Linda Wagner-Martin sees
Kingsolver’s trajectory from that point as grappling with being a mother and a
novelist simultaneously; certainly, mother/daughter themes permeate much of
her writing.
The year after The Bean Trees appeared, Kingsolver published Holding the
Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989), a journalistic work
she had been preparing for several years, as well as a collection of short stories,
Homeland and Other Stories (1989). Her second novel, Animal Dreams (1990),
again visited issues of corruption and human-rights abuses in Central America,