Ann Patchett - Published Work

Published Work

Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review, where she published a story before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, where she wrote primarily non-fiction and the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine was cruel and eventually she stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"

Patchett has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue.

In 1992, Patchett published The Patron Saint of Liars. The novel was made into a movie of the same title in 1998. Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997. In 2001, her fourth novel Bel Canto was her breakthrough, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award.

A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run, was released in October 2007. What now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006.

Patchett is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories. In 2011 she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle.