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E. Annie Proulx began writing novels relatively late in life -- just past 50 -- but she has achieved the kind of success that most novelists can only dream of. With a mere three novels and two collections of short stories since 1988, she has won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other honors. John Updike included one of her stories in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, which he edited for Houghton Mifflin, and Proulx herself was selected to edit the 1997 edition of the venerable Best American Short Stories series. Her books are not just critics' choices, either; they are hugely popular with the reading public. Proulx is a purveyor of a kind of contemporary gothic fiction. Her settings tend to be forbidding landscapes -- which play as important a role in the narratives as any character -- and she composes intricate dramas of people trying to adapt to tragic circumstances. Postcards protagonist Loyal Blood, for example, flees his ancestral home after the mysterious death of his girlfriend, and the novel chronicles his aimless 30-year odyssey and the simultaneous ruin of the family farm he left behind.

What distinguishes Proulx's novels, besides a voice that has been praised for both its lyricism and its extraordinary authenticity, is an historian's rigor for details. Proulx has said that research is the best part of writing, and her stories have an immediacy that is rare in fiction. Every book also has its quirky motif: Each chapter in Postcards begins with a correspondence between Blood and his family; in The Shipping News, chapters are introduced with a drawing of a knot and a bit of philosophy from The Ashley Book of Knots; and in Accordion Crimes, the motif is the movement of a musical instrument through the hands of several generations of American immigrants.

Good to Know An habitual driver of the country's back roads, Proulx is known for capturing the minutiae of out-of-the-way American life. Her willingness to examine and haul away small-town rubbish is so eager and indiscriminate that her bookshelves are stuffed with such threadbare oddments as a pamphlet of Spam recipes, a history of corncob pipes, and a guide to gate crashing. It is in these rural outbacks that she also finds the snippets of conversation and the place names like Joe Batt's Arm and Seldom Come By that lend her books their eccentric ring of truth.

Nostalgic for the public libraries of days gone by, Proulx says she misses the old wooden card-catalog trays because they offered chance, "browse-by" encounters with information you might not have known existed. Furthermore -- and this is a bit surprising from a writer with highly developed literary sympathies for suffering humankind -- she dislikes the fact that "in bad weather homeless folk exuding pungent odors doze at the reading tables."

Proulx rarely grants interviews and is known to be rather prickly on occasion. Despite the fact that fame has relieved her forever from waitressing, postal clerking, and the tedium of writing magazine articles -- which sustained her for 19 years before her success -- like many literary writers she resents the system that tries so hard to foster celebrity. Especially since the process of her art requires quiet and privacy. "In a sense [fame] is like someone continually ransacking your personal life," she says.

In addition to her many honors, Proulx also holds the distinction of being the first woman to receive the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award, for Postcards.