A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley

Literary fiction · Tragedy

First published: 1991
Print length: 371 pagesAnchor Books, 2003

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1992

National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 1991

Description

Ginny narrates life on her family’s thousand-acre Iowa farm, where aging patriarch Larry Cook abruptly transfers joint ownership to his three daughters. When the youngest objects, Larry cuts her out, leaving Ginny and her remaining sister to manage both the land and their father’s volatile response to surrendering control. The division turns a prosperous farm into the ground of an escalating family conflict, exposing buried truths and emotions that years of obedience have kept contained. For Ginny, the upheaval reaches into her troubled marriage, fertility struggles, and understanding of the relationships that shaped her. Recasting King Lear within rural America, the novel explores inheritance, pride, justice, and the danger concealed beneath an orderly family landscape.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Intimate · Melancholic · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FamilyIdentityJusticeMarriagePowerTrauma

About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is an American novelist whose fiction ranges from family tragedy and intimate studies of marriage to broad institutional satire. Across these forms, she examines apparently stable social worlds under pressure, tracing how inheritance, ambition, money, desire, and private grievance reshape relationships. She adjusts her narrative method to the scale of the subject: A Thousand Acres uses Ginny’s first-person perspective to recast King Lear on an Iowa farm, while Moo distributes attention across more than a dozen plots to portray a Midwestern university as a network of competing interests. The Age of Grief narrows the focus, allowing marital uncertainty to gather through ordinary domestic routines. Her nonfiction extends this attention to the novel itself. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel considers its history and nature across a span from The Tale of Genji to contemporary American women’s writing.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Anchor Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9781400033836

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