A Thousand Acres

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)

    Thou art the unanswered question;
    Couldst see thy proper eye,
    Alway it asketh, asketh;
    And each answer is a lie.
    So take thy quest through nature,
    It through thousand natures ply;
    Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
    Time is the false reply.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    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)