Who

Francine Prose is a prolific author and the president of PEN American center.

Backstory

Prose grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Radcliffe in 1968, before enrolling in a doctoral program in medieval English literature at Harvard. She dropped out two years later and went to find herself in India, where she stayed for a year while working on her first novel, Judah the Pious. When she got back to the U.S., Prose sent the book to a former professor, who hooked her up with an editor at Simon & Schuster. The book sold for $1,000, which "seemed like a fortune." She's since published 9 more novels and various works of non-fiction, and become an in-demand cultural critic and professor. Her essays and reviews pop up regularly in places like the Times, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review.

Of note

Prose's most recent novel, 2005's A Changed Man (2005), is about a 32-year-old former neo-Nazi who, seeing the error of his ways during an Ecstasy buzz, goes to work for a humanitarian foundation run by a Holocaust survivor. (She says the idea came from watching two young skinheads on the subway in Brooklyn.)

Over the course of her career, Prose has racked up nearly every big literary award—a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the New York Public Library, two NEA grants, a Fulbright grant, the National Jewish Book Award, and a PEN Translation Prize. Those wishing to follow in her prolific footsteps can buy her book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006), which she says was inspired by her MFA writing students at Bard. Prose was baffled that some of them "had never read Dostoyevsky, didn't know how to spell Turgenev."

Drama

Having agreed to teach a class in the MFA writing program at Brooklyn College headed by her friend, the Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Cunningham, Prose pulled out after reading the students' work, which she didn't think was worthy of her time and effort.

On screen

Her novel Household Saints was made into a 1993 film with Tracey Ullmann and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Personal

The mother of two adult sons, Prose lives with her husband Howard Michels, a painter, in the Village.