1. She was born June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York.
2. She was the first in her family to complete high school.
3. She attended Syracuse on scholarship and graduated as valedictorian in 1960.
4. She then received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
5. She published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26.
6. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid.
7. Her novel them received the National Book Award in 1970.
8. Since 1970 she has published an average of two books a year, with a common theme of violence.
9. In 1996, she published We Were the Mulvaneys, which was selected for Oprah's Book Club and quickly became a bestseller.
10. She has written under the pen names of "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."
11. She is a member of Mensa.
12. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
13. She has published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.
14. She has been a professor at Princeton since 1978.
15. She has been one of the leading American novelists since the 1960s.
For years she has been considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Do you think she will win? Which of her books have you read?
