Wall Street Journal's 'Influencers' Spotlight Finds Barbara Kingsolver '77

October 18, 2018

According to Barbara Kingsolver, "It’s a fascinating life, being a novelist." She tells the Wall Street Journal, "It’s a kind of controlled schizophrenia when I’m deeply into it. I watch a movie in my head. It becomes really, really hard to turn off the computer at the end of the day. I just would rather stay in and just go on living in there until I suppose they found my skeleton hunched over the keyboard. So it’s lucky I have a family. They knock on my door and say, 'Barbara, time to come out and live in the world again."

Kingsolver is a 1977 graduate of DePauw University, whose latest novel, Unsheltered, arrived in bookstores this week. She is the subject of the Journal's "Influencers" feature.

Of her characters, Kingsolver says, "My job is to make them seem like real people. I think that task is relevant to the times we’re in. To reduce things greatly, I live in the red end of a blue state. In actual fact, every state is purple, every county is purple, every household, every marriage is some shade of purple."

She tells the publication, "I think it was Mary Oliver who said, 'The poet is speaking to the person who will read this 50 years after I’m dead.' I didn’t get that exactly right. That is exactly the way I see it. So I would be very happy for 100,000 people to read this book next month, that would delight me, but I’m also writing for hundreds of thousands of people who will come later. In some ways, that’s why I set the novel in two separate centuries, because I want to talk about what is timeless."

Access the complete piece here.

Unsheltered was listed among "The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2018" by Publishers Weekly. USA Today previewed the highly anticipated book in June.

Kingsolver's previous novels include Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the 2010 Orange Prize and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A 1977 graduate of DePauw University, where she majored in zoology (biology), Kingsolver said in a PBS documentary, "I wanted to go somewhere far away and exotic, so I went to DePauw University in Indiana. All the scales fell from my eyes; it was wonderful."

Kingsolver delivered the 1994 commencement address at her alma mater, "As Little Advice as Possible." You can see and hear the speech below.