A Thousand Acres is a 1991 novel by American author Jane Smiley. It won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and was adapted to a 1997 film of the same name.
The novel is a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear and is set on a thousand acre (four hundred hectares) farm in Iowa that is owned by a family of a father and his three daughters. It is told through the point of view of the oldest daughter, Ginny.
Read more about A Thousand Acres: Plot Summary, Similarity To King Lear, Characters
Famous quotes containing the words thousand acres, thousand and/or acres:
“Charles Foster Kane: You always said you wanted to live in a palace.
Susan Alexander: Oh, a person could go crazy in this dump. Nobody to talk to, nobody to have any fun with.
Charles Foster Kane: Susan.
Susan Alexander: Forty-nine thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues. I’m lonely.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)
“Most days I feel like an acrobat high above a crowd out of which my own parents, my in-laws, potential employers, phantoms of “other women who do it” and a thousand faceless eyes stare up.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground:”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)