It’s the birthday of author and Christian thinker Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943), one of the U.S.’s great novelists and intellectuals, best known for two very different novels, Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004), the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robinson (originally Summers) was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on the day after Thanksgiving, and grew up an hour south in Coeur d’Alene. (Kind of a fancy name for a town in Idaho, but whatever.) Robinson’s father worked in the timber industry and her mother was at home; they were married for 54 years. Robinson was very close to her older brother, David Summers, who today is a scholar in Renaissance art, and they remain close. She had a habit when growing up of passing out periodically, just completely conking out, as when she came across her father while he was skinning a deer. (He never hunted again.)

Robinson studied American lit at Brown University (1966) and got her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington (1977). Her first novel, Housekeeping, is about two sisters whose mother commits suicide; they are raised by various relatives of varying competency. The novel won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was also nominated for a Pulitzer. For a time, Robinson focused on writing essays and nonfiction, and her book Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1988) was nominated for a National Book Award. (Spoiler alert: it’s eeeeeeeeever so slightly critical of Britain’s record of environmental pollution, which is even more impressive than I had realized.) From 1989 to 2016, Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Iowa City; she worshipped and even preached at the Congregational United Church of Christ there.

Gilead, Robinson’s second novel, marked her return to fiction; it’s an epistolary novel in which an aging minister writes about his family history to his young son. (NB: I’ve never met anyone who read this book who didn’t love it. When I tried to read it years ago, I had a young son myself for the first time and found it so poignant I had to put it aside. But I’m kind of a sap. Maybe it’s time to try again.) The characters in Gilead return in Home (2008, Orange Prize for Fiction) and Lila (2014, National Book Critics Circle Award). Robinson, a devout and thoughtful Christian, continues to write nonfiction, addressing everything from the debate between science and religion to ethical issues regarding how we should live to Protestant doctrine and history. In 2012, President Obama presented Robinson with the National Humanities Medal; Obama lists Gilead as among his favorite books. Robinson’s latest book of essays is What Are We Doing Here? (2018).

Robinson, who is divorced, is close to her two grown sons and is currently working on a new novel.

Good luck scraping two brain cells together on this fourth day after Thanksgiving, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.