In 1976, with Canute. 

Jane Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, in a family of storytellers—and it shows. During the two afternoons I spent ­interviewing her, I heard about how her great-­grandmother, a Norwegian immigrant, met her husband while going door-to-door as a dressmaker in Saint Paul, Minnesota; how her grandfather nearly froze to death during a blizzard on an Idaho ranch; how her grandmother lost the diamond ring her husband had won in a poker game. One anecdote led to another, and she frequently interrupted herself to ask, “Did I tell you about . . . ” before launching into a story within a story, a pattern that continued as she made scones, cooked dinner, fed her horses, and drove. 

Smiley is equally prolific on the page: since 1980 she has published two story collections and fourteen novels, including a murder mystery, a ­medieval epic, a college satire, a nineteenth-century picaresque, and reworkings of Shakespeare and Boccaccio. In 1992, Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, a modern-dress King Lear set in Iowa farm ­country. Her most recent novels make up the Last Hundred Years trilogy, a year-by-year, multigenerational account of a Midwestern family between 1920 and 2020. Smiley’s intimate evocations of American life have been compared to John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy; Updike himself praised Smiley for working on what he called “the edge of acceptable novel writing,” where she had replaced “plot and suspense with something freer and more lifelike—casual talk, generally inconsequential but creating a lattice of cross-purpose in which emotions and attractions extend their tendrils.”

In addition to her fiction, Smiley has written a wide-ranging critical study, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, as well as short biographies of Charles Dickens and the physicist John Vincent Atanasoff. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the author of the Horses of Oak Valley Ranch series of books for young adults. 

This interview was conducted last September at the mountainside house in Carmel Valley, California, that Smiley shares with her husband, Jack Canning (Smiley has dedicated the Last Hundred Years trilogy to her four husbands—John, Bill, Steve, and Jack), and their three dogs, Frida, Fallon, and Abby Rose.

—Nicole Rudick

INTERVIEWER

When did you get your first horse?

SMILEY

At the end of ninth grade. She was a seven-year-old thoroughbred, off the racetrack. Sometimes she would take the bit and run away, but I didn’t care. I was happy. But that horse was killed in a foxhunting accident. We were galloping, and I turned, and she slipped in some mud, fell, and broke her stifle, and the vet said she couldn’t be saved. About six months later, I talked my parents into another one. 

INTERVIEWER

Why did you stop riding when you went to college? 

SMILEY

I thought I’d go to a place like Sweet Briar College and pursue my equestrian career, but my mother said no, I had to go to one of the Seven Sisters. So I went to Vassar, and they didn’t have a riding program. She wanted me to be an intellectual. I was her eldest child, and she thought that being a writer was the best thing you could be.

INTERVIEWER

Did your mother write?

SMILEY

My mother joined the wac toward the end of the Second World War and worked for the newspaper the army put out. She’s never talked too much about it, but there are all these pictures of her from the war doing various modeling bits for the army. 

INTERVIEWER

Why did she join the army?

SMILEY

To get out of town. Her family could afford one year of college, so after high school, she went to Illinois State for a year. After that, she worked in a factory for a while, then thought, I’ll join the wac and see the world. And it succeeded, because she did see a lot of the world. 

She was stationed in Paris for about three years, and then came home and worked for the Memphis Press-Scimitar and then, when she moved back to Saint Louis, for the Globe-Democrat. She was the women’s-page editor, starting in about 1951, for eight or ten years, writing about fashion shows and ­interviewing people. She interviewed Katharine Hepburn when she came to town. She also tried to write a couple of novels about the war. I’ve read a bit of them, and they’re sort of light. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you go to college thinking you were going to write?

SMILEY

At first I thought I was going to be a jockey, but that was evidently not going to happen—I was already too tall. In seventh grade I thought I was going to be a nuclear physicist. And when I got really tall, there was a moment I thought I might be a model, but when I went to see an agent, she announced that my hips were too narrow. Then, in my senior year of high school, I was able to go to England for spring vacation. My stepfather had some friends who lived in London, right by Marble Arch, and I stayed with them. It was a fabulous visit, because I ranged around and explored the neighborhood and they took me to a lot of places around England. One of the oddest things I did there was, I went to Speakers’ Corner and got up on the podium and started talking. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember what you said? 

SMILEY

I do not remember what I said, but I thought, This is totally bizarre, a ­seventeen-year-old girl getting on the podium at Speakers’ Corner. But that’s what a novelist would do—say, Oh, I have an opinion about something. 

INTERVIEWER

Were you generally precocious?

SMILEY

Freshman year, my roommate, Barbara Blatner—who is now a playwright in New York—was way, way ahead of me in every conceivable way. On the second or third night of orientation, we file into the auditorium, and a ­gynecologist, a psychiatrist, and a chaplain give us the sex talk—how to be careful and what to do—and I didn’t understand a word of it. When we got back to the room, I said, Barbara, you know when they were talking about that stuff? What is that? And she spent three nights answering questions. I was blown away. The one question I remember asking was, So what is sixty-nine? When she told me, I nearly fell out of bed in amazement. I could not believe what that was.