Author of the week: Ann Beattie

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s surprising that some serious readers now have to Google “Ann Beattie” to know who she is, said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. Thirty-five years ago, Beattie was “the most popular and admired writer” of her post-hippie cohort. The New Yorker seemed to run one of her short stories every other week, and in each one, Beattie’s pot-smoking, emotionally adrift characters appeared to be explicitly created to explain a generation to itself. “I’m more and more surprised as time goes on that I ever prevailed as much as I did,” she says now. She claims she never even thought of herself as the chief chronicler of a particular moment: “Zeitgeist—that just isn’t a word that comes to my mouth.”

Beattie’s new novella, Walks With Men, is part of a concerted campaign by her publisher to get Beattie on nightstands again. It’s another book about young people who are trying to find their footing, and it will be followed this fall by a new collection of all 48 of Beattie’s New Yorker stories. Beattie, who currently teaches at the University of Virginia and also spends time in Maine, says she isn’t surprised that young readers generally prefer to have their world interpreted by writers who are young themselves. “Sometimes I have the illusion that it’s better in Canada,” she says. “Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje—nobody thinks about those people’s ages. I also think in this country women are marginalized as they grow older—though maybe that’s self-serving.”