Born in 1935 in Norwich, Connecticut, the eldest of five daughters of George Napoleon Proulx, vice-president of a textile company, and Lois Nelly Proulx, a painter and naturalist whose family had lived in Connecticut since 1635, Annie Proulx grew up in towns all over New England. She graduated with a degree in history from the University of Vermont in 1969 and obtained a master's degree, passing oral exams for a Ph.D. in history in 1975. But then Proulx's career took a turn. Discouraged by "the lack of teaching jobs in my field," or so she wrote in a brief autobiographical note in Contemporary Authors, she abandoned academia for freelance journalism: In 1975...I gave up my dissertation and plunged headlong into freelance journalism. A classic case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. I lived at that time with a friend in a rural cabin in Canaan, Vermont, close to the Canadian border, under conditions of brutal privation compensated by silence and decent fishing, both now gone.
In a manner reminiscent of method purists like Robert De Niro who became a boxer during the training for Raging Bull, Proulx seems to have consciously sought deprivation, listing a series of her adventures for David Streitfeld in an interview in the Washington Post in 1993: Leaping a barbed wire fence and not getting caught on it, running down a lonely lane away from a strange old man who tried to grab me, fleeing through rain on the eve of a wedding, climbing three-quarters of the way across a wet railroad bridge over a river when the train appeared at the other end of the bridge; getting caught in a thunderstorm on my third flying lesson; throwing a knife at (and thankfully missing) someone I thought I hated; accelerating and rolling a car late at night heading north and ending up in the hospital considerably battered; falling off a ladder; having a ladder fall on me, etc., etc.
The impersonal compression of this list and the casual tone she adopts present themselves as a kind of caricature punching bag for life’s blows—a staple of her fictional work as well, where she treats her characters, at times, with a certain condescension, even contempt.
In the 1980s, she raised three sons from her third marriage alone (she also has a daughter), earning her living by publishing how-to articles and books that sound now as if they were pulled from the pages of her novels: Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider; The Complete Dairy Cookbook, how to make everything from cheese to custard in your own kitchen; and Plan and Build Your Own Fences, Gates, Walkways, Walls & Drives. She moved to Vershire, Vermont, and started a newspaper, the Vershire Behind the Times, while writing short stories, many of which appeared in so-called "hook and bullet" magazines (Gray's Sporting Journal) and Esquire...
About: Understanding the disaster dreams of the sixties double-cross in the Congo requires delving into the complex socio-political dynamics of the era, marked by Cold War tensions, decolonization struggles, and internal power plays within African nations emerging from colonial rule.