She believes that fiction can be used as an instrument of social change, and her own fiction reflects this belief. Published in 1988, The Bean Trees was her first novel.īest known as a novelist, Kingsolver also writes poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction. Her contact in Arizona with people from Latin America, particularly refugees, influenced Kingsolver's choice of subject matter when she turned to fiction. By the mid-1980s she was writing and publishing short fiction. Following graduate school, Kingsolver turned back to her life-long love-writing- and began writing nonfiction as a technical writer in a scientific program at the university. In her twenties she moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she eventually earned a graduate degree in ecology at the University of Arizona. She began writing as a young child, but chose to study biology in college at DePauw University. Author Biographyīorn in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky. Kingsolver has been praised for her skill in The Bean Trees at walking the fine line between preaching and taking a moral stand, and Taylor's straightforwardness and humor provide the cornerstone to Kingsolver's approach.

This voice helps to guide the novel, with its strong humanitarian views, away from simple political correctness toward a rich believability.

Like her narrator, Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky, and she draws from the voices she heard in her youth to create Taylor's voice.

Critics and readers alike relish Taylor's humor and warmth, with her down-home speech and perceptive observations. Published in 1988 to an enthusiastic critical reception, The Bean Trees won an American Library Association award and a School Library Association award and has found a devoted reading audience around the world. Taylor's adoption of an abused Cherokee toddler, her friendship with a pair of Guatemalan refugees, and her support system of a small community of women, all contribute to the novel's central conviction that people cannot survive without empathy and generosity. The novel focuses on Taylor Greer's search for a new life as she moves from her dull Kentucky home to exotic Arizona and the lessons that she learns along the way. Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates that politics are personal in The Bean Trees, her novel of friendship and survival set in the arid American Southwest.

The bean trees