Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and other award-winning novels, will present the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities’ 2014 Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women’s Voices Lecture at Case Western Reserve University. The free and public event will be held on Monday, March 31, at 4:30 p.m., in the Wolstein Research Building auditorium.
Smiley will discuss her writings, including A Thousand Acres, her modern-day take on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which portrays the struggles of an Iowa farmer whose three daughters fight over his estate as he’s dying.
Following the book’s success, Jocelyn Moorehead directed the novel’s adaptation to the big screen in a 1997 film that starred Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the daughters and Jason Robards as their father.
Other novels followed A Thousand Acres, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award: Moo, The All and True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (winner of the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West), Horse Heaven, Private Life (named best book of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Washington Post) and a four-volume young adult series about a horse that was short-listed for the 2002 Orange Prize.
Smiley has also published the non-fiction works Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel and The Man Who Invented the Computer.
Smiley’s literary contributions earned her membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Registration is recommended. For information, call or email Maggie Kaminski in the Baker-Nord Center at 216.368.2242 or humanities@case.edu.