Author Guide · Literary Fiction
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Annie Proulx was in her fifties when her first novel came out. Before that she had written how-to books on cider, grapes, fences and salad gardens, and a first collection of stories set in rural New England. Then, within two years, Postcards (1992) made her the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Shipping News (1993) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In October 1997 The New Yorker printed a story about two Wyoming ranch hands called “Brokeback Mountain”; Ang Lee’s film of it won three Oscars in 2006. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1988–2022 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Annie Proulx has published 11 key books of fiction and nonfiction since 1988. The best known are The Shipping News (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), the collection that contains “Brokeback Mountain”. Start with The Shipping News; if you prefer stories, start with Close Range. Below: every book in order, a reading path, and what she has said about the Brokeback film.
Where to Start with Annie Proulx
If you want her defining novel
→ The Shipping News (1993) — the Pulitzer winner set in Newfoundland.
If you want short stories
→ Close Range (1999) — the Wyoming collection that includes “Brokeback Mountain”.
If you want a big historical saga
→ Barkskins (2016) — three centuries of forests and two families.
If you want her nonfiction
→ Fen, Bog & Swamp (2022) — a short history of the world’s wetlands.
11 Annie Proulx Books, in Order
Heart Songs and Other Stories
Her first collection: stories of farming, hunting and old grudges in rural New England. In “On the Antler” two old men have been enemies since school; in “Bedrock” a widower loses his farm to his young second wife; several stories mock city people who move to the country. It was reissued in 1994 as Heart Songs, with slightly altered contents.
Postcards
Her first novel. Loyal Blood kills his girlfriend by accident, abandons his family’s Vermont farm and drifts across America for decades, while the family he left behind falls apart. Picture postcards sent over some forty years mark the changes in American life. It made Proulx the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, in 1993.
The Shipping News
After his faithless wife Petal dies in a car crash, Quoyle, a hapless newspaperman from upstate New York, takes his two daughters and his aunt Agnis Hamm to the family’s abandoned house in Newfoundland. He writes car wrecks and the shipping news for the Gammy Bird in Killick-Claw, learns dark things about his ancestors and slowly falls for a local woman, Wavey Prowse. Chapter heads come from The Ashley Book of Knots. It also won the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and was filmed in 2001.
Accordion Crimes
A green button accordion arrives in America with a Sicilian immigrant in the late 1800s and passes, over about a hundred years, through the hands of German, Polish, Norwegian, French-Canadian, Cajun and other families, by inheritance, violence and bad luck. Each owner’s story is a new chapter of the immigrant experience. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1997.
Close Range
Her first book of Wyoming stories, from “The Half-Skinned Steer”, about an old man driving back to his family’s ranch, and “The Mud Below”, about the bull rider Diamond Felts, to “Brokeback Mountain”, about two ranch hands, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who meet herding sheep in 1963. It was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and won the New Yorker Book Award.
That Old Ace in the Hole
Bob Dollar, 25, is sent to the town of Woolybucket in the Texas Panhandle by Global Pork Rind, a multinational hog-farm company, to find land for its pig farms, while pretending to scout for luxury homes. As he stays on, the region’s past, from an 1845 Army mapping expedition to the oil boom of the 1950s, runs through the stories he is told.
Bad Dirt
Her second Wyoming collection. In “The Contest” the men of Elk Tooth stop shaving for two seasons; in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” Gilbert Wolfscale’s devotion to his failing ranch drives away his wife and sons.
Fine Just the Way It Is
Nine stories, including “Family Man”, in which an old cowboy in a care home learns his father had four families, “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and “Tits-Up in a Ditch”. Two stories, “I’ve Always Loved This Place” and “Swamp Mischief”, are set in Hell; several critics thought they did not belong in a book of Wyoming stories.
Bird Cloud
The story of designing and building her house on Bird Cloud, 640 acres of Wyoming wetland and prairie above the North Platte River, land that belonged to the Nature Conservancy when she first saw it. It mixes the building saga with natural history, the archaeology of the region and her own family history.
Barkskins
Two Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France in 1693 as indentured woodcutters, or “barkskins”. The 736-page novel follows their descendants — Sel’s, who marry into the Mi’kmaq, and Duquet’s, who build a timber business — into the present, as the forests of North America and beyond are cut down. National Geographic adapted it as a television series in 2020.
Fen, Bog & Swamp
A short history of fens, bogs and swamps, mostly in North America, and of how they were drained for farmland, and why that matters: peatlands store carbon, and destroying them releases it. Proulx began it as an essay when she found she could not concentrate on fiction, and has said it is “not a call to action” but a lesson in looking.
In What Order to Read Annie Proulx
None of Proulx’s novels continue from one to the next, so you can start anywhere. The three Wyoming collections are numbered, but each stands alone; reading them in order shows the stories growing darker and then, in Bad Dirt and Fine Just the Way It Is, more comic and stranger.
A good route is The Shipping News first, then Close Range for the stories at full strength, then the long novels. Keep Barkskins for when you are sure you like her: it runs to more than 700 pages and covers three centuries.
A reading path
1. The Shipping News (1993)
2. Close Range (1999)
3. Postcards (1992)
4. Accordion Crimes (1996)
5. Barkskins (2016)
Everything Else Annie Proulx Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 8 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Early how-to books
7
7 books · 1980–2003
- 1980Sweet & Hard Ciderwith Lew Nichols
- 1980Great Grapes: Grow the Best Evera guide to growing grapes
- 1983Making the Best Apple Cidera short guide
- 1983Plan and Make Your Own Fences & Gates, Walkways, Walls & Drivesa practical handbook
- 1985The Fine Art of Salad Gardeninga gardening book
- 1987The Gourmet Gardenera gardening book
- 2003Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cidera later cider book, with Lew Nichols
Forthcoming
1
1 book · 2026
- 2026Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected19 stories, three of them new, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín; due from Scribner on 10 November 2026
The years · 1935–2026
Quick facts about Annie Proulx
- Known for
- Annie Proulx is known for stories and novels in which harsh landscapes, from Newfoundland to the Wyoming range, shape and often destroy the people who live in them.
- 1935
- Born in Norwich, Connecticut
- 1963
- First published story, in If magazine
- 2005
- Ang Lee films “Brokeback Mountain”
- 2026
- Stories: New and Selected due
- Born
- 22 August 1935, Norwich, Connecticut, as Edna Ann Proulx; early books appeared as E. Annie Proulx
- Education
- BA in history, University of Vermont (1969); MA, Sir George Williams University, Montreal (1973)
- Major prizes
- PEN/Faulkner Award (1993), National Book Award (1993), Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1994)
- Honours
- National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2017); Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2018)
- Homes
- Vermont for more than 30 years, Wyoming from 1994, later Port Townsend, Washington
- Family
- Married and divorced three times; four children
The red mark is 1993: The Shipping News, which won the National Book Award that year and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
How Annie Proulx Writes: Place First, Names That Stick
Landscape and work drive her fiction. Her characters fish, herd sheep, ride bulls, cut timber or scout land for hog farms, and the weather, the economy and the terrain decide more of their lives than they do. The Shipping News is built around knots: every chapter opens with an entry from Clifford Ashley’s The Ashley Book of Knots (1944), and a “quoyle” is a flat coil of rope, which is what her hero is for the first half of the book.
Her names are deliberate. She told The Paris Review in 2009 that she uses unusual names partly as a mnemonic for readers, that she keeps a book of names and keeps adding to it, and that a character’s name may change six or seven times before she is done. Hence Loyal Blood, Diamond Felts, Bob Dollar and Wavey Prowse.
Her stories turn on sudden accidents and violence, often told in a single flat sentence, and on black comedy, as in the Hell stories of Fine Just the Way It Is. The long novels, Accordion Crimes and Barkskins, stretch the same method over a century or more, following an object or a family line rather than one hero. For other American writers of hard country, see the guides to Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane below.
Watch
Annie Proulx at the National Book Festival
Proulx speaks at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington in 2018, the year the Library gave her its Prize for American Fiction.
Frequently asked questions about Annie Proulx’s books
How many books has Annie Proulx written?
Eleven key books, listed on this page: five novels, four story collections, a memoir and a book on wetlands, from Heart Songs (1988) to Fen, Bog & Swamp (2022). Before her fiction she also wrote seven how-to books on cider, gardening and fences (1980–2003), and Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected is due in November 2026.
What are Annie Proulx’s books in order?
Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), Accordion Crimes (1996), Close Range (1999), That Old Ace in the Hole (2002), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way It Is (2008), Bird Cloud (2011), Barkskins (2016) and Fen, Bog & Swamp (2022).
Where should I start with Annie Proulx?
With The Shipping News (1993), her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a lost newspaperman who moves to Newfoundland. If you would rather begin with stories, read Close Range (1999), which ends with “Brokeback Mountain”.
What is Annie Proulx’s most famous book?
The Shipping News, which won the National Book Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. Her most famous single piece is the story “Brokeback Mountain”, first published in The New Yorker on 13 October 1997 and collected in Close Range.
Is Brokeback Mountain a book?
It is a short story. It appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and, slightly expanded, as the last story in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). Ang Lee’s 2005 film, with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, won Oscars for director, adapted screenplay and score. Proulx also wrote the libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s opera, which premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on 28 January 2014.
Which Annie Proulx books have been adapted?
The Shipping News was filmed in 2001 by Lasse Hallström, with Kevin Spacey, Judi Dench and Julianne Moore. “Brokeback Mountain” became Ang Lee’s 2005 film and a 2014 opera. Barkskins became a National Geographic television series in 2020.
What did Annie Proulx say about the Brokeback Mountain Oscars?
When Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture in March 2006, she wrote an essay for The Guardian calling Academy voters “out of touch with their own segregated city” and Crash a safe choice. In 2008 she said she wished she had never written the story, because of the rewrites of it that fans kept sending her.
What prizes has Annie Proulx won?
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Postcards (1993), the first time a woman won it; the National Book Award (1993) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1994) for The Shipping News; and, for her body of work, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2017) and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2018).
Is Annie Proulx still alive?
Yes. She was born on 22 August 1935 in Norwich, Connecticut. Scribner is publishing Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected, with three new stories, on 10 November 2026.
Why did Annie Proulx start publishing fiction so late?
She wrote stories from the 1960s, publishing her first in 1963, but for years earned her living as a journalist and from how-to books. Her first collection came out in 1988, when she was 53, and her first novel, Postcards, in 1992.
Who wrote Brokeback Mountain?
Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain. The short story first appeared in The New Yorker on 13 October 1997 and was collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrote the screenplay for Ang Lee’s 2005 film.
How do you pronounce Annie Proulx?
Proulx is pronounced “Proo”, rhyming with “true”.
Where does Annie Proulx live?
She lived for many years in Wyoming, where she built the house she describes in her memoir Bird Cloud (2011). As of 2019 she was living in Port Townsend, Washington.
Was Annie Proulx married, and does she have children?
She has been married and divorced three times, and has three sons and a daughter.
Footnotes
- Annie Proulx — Wikipedia
- Brokeback Mountain (short story) — Wikipedia
- Annie Proulx, The Art of Fiction No. 199 — The Paris Review, 2009
- Annie Proulx vents frustration over Brokeback — The Advocate, 2006
- In Fen, Bog & Swamp, Annie Proulx pens a history of wetland destruction — NPR via WAMC, 2022
- Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected — Simon & Schuster
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The reason I put out-of-the-ordinary names on characters is because the John Smiths of the literary world make me sick.”
— Annie Proulx, interview with Christopher Cox, The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 199 (2009)
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