The fiction of the contemporary, Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer E. Annie Proulx (author of Postcards, Heart Songs, The Shipping News, and Accordian Crimes) portrays the unique landscapes and cultures of places and captures the movement of travel so vividly that her work could be viewed as a kind of travel writing in story and novel form. Like some of her characters, Proulx is an avowed "wanderer" who has spent a lot of time on the road. She once told an interviewer that "the most fun thing about writing is \ jumping in my pickup truck and taking off--stop along by a graveyard, write some, and then sleep in the truck" (qtd. by Dwight Garner, VLS, No. 114, April 1993, p. 29.; rpt. Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 81, p. 271). Yet while testifying to the importance of firsthand road experience and thorough research, Proulx also emphasizes the importance of imagination: "Imagination is the mind's central life strategy . . . . From it springs ideas, images, actions, absurdities, beliefs, as blades of grass from underground rhizomes. For many people--for myself and perhaps for you--the life of the mind, the realm of the imagination is a more brilliant and compelling world than the one we inhabit" ("Questionnaire: Imagining the Way Through," Hungry Mind Review, 1, http://www.bookwire.com/hmr/Review/proulxsur.html).
This paper will explore the way in which experience and imagination intersect in Proulx's work to produce fiction of sparkling vividness. By combining minute observation of places and people, painstaking research, and the creative powers of the imagination, Proulx produces work that is as much about the places and times her stories are set in as about the characters who people them. Thus she not only entertains her readers mightily but also educates them about local and regional cultures and helps keep alive the ambiance and lore of the places about which she writes. I will investigate the means by which Proulx conveys to readers a sense of the unique atmosphere and way of life in the North American locales in which her characters live or through which they pass. In my discussion of Proulx's fiction I will touch on subjects like fictionality in travel writing and the means by which travel writing becomes fiction.
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