Her essays and book reviews appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, and in 1989 she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, a scathing examination of the environmental and public health dangers posed by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England-and the political and moral corruption that sustained it. In the interval, Robinson devoted herself to writing nonfiction. Yet it would be more than twenty years before she wrote another novel. The book became a classic, and Robinson was hailed as one of the defining American writers of our time. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration,” wrote Anatole Broyard, with an enthusiasm and awe that was shared by many critics and readers. But an early review in The New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. When Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, she was unknown in the literary world. Interviewed by Sarah Fay Issue 186, Fall 2008
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