Jane Smiley
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Jane Smiley (b. September 26, 1949) is an award-winning American novelist. She graduated from John Burroughs School in Saint Louis, Missouri, got a B.A. at Vassar College, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where she continues to teach. She published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, but it was for her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, that she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.