Barbara Kingsolver - Writing Career

Writing Career

Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988, and told the story of a young woman who leaves Kentucky for Arizona, adopting an abandoned child along the way; she wrote it at night while pregnant with her first child and struggling with insomnia. Her next work of fiction, published in 1990, was Homeland and Other Stories, a collection of short stories on a variety of topics exploring various themes from the evolution of cultural and ancestral lands to the struggles of marriage. The novel Animal Dreams was also published in 1990, followed by Pigs in Heaven, the sequel to The Bean Trees, in 1993. The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, is one of her best known works; it chronicles the lives of the wife and daughters of an Evangelical minister on a Christian mission in Africa. Although the setting of the novel is somewhat similar to Kingsolver's own childhood trip to the then Republic of Congo, the novel is not autobiographical. Her next novel, published in 2000, was Prodigal Summer, set in southern Appalachia. The Lacuna was published in 2009; her most recent novel, entitled Flight Behavior, was published in 2012. It explores environmental themes and highlights the potential effects of global warming on the Monarch butterfly.

Kingsolver is also a published poet and essayist. Two of her essay collections, High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2003), have been published, and an anthology of her poetry was published in 1998 under the title Another America. Her prose poetry also accompanied photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt in a 2002 work titled Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands.

Her major non-fiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 and 2007's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a description of eating locally. She has also been published as a science journalist in periodicals such as Economic Botany on topics such as desert plants and bioresources.