It’s the birthday of writer and horse lover Jane Smiley (b. 1949), whose 1991 novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer and who has sometimes been called “America’s greatest living novelist.” (Discuss.)

Smiley was born in Los Angeles but moved in infancy to St. Louis, Missouri; her father left early on and she never saw him again but grew up surrounded by lots of talkative relatives. She studied at Vassar, where the six-foot-two Smiley was attracted to a taller Yale student named John Whiston. (Spoiler alert: don’t get fond of Whiston.) They married in 1970, went hitchhiking in Europe with a typewriter, returned to both do graduate work at the University of Iowa, and ended the marriage in 1975, the same year Smiley got her PhD in medieval lit. Smiley then entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She married again in 1978 (and had two daughters with this husband) and brought out her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, followed by At Paradise Gate (1981), the mystery Duplicate Keys (1984), and her personal favorite, The Greenlanders (1988), an epic novel about the Norse inhabitation of Greenland six centuries ago. (By then she had divorced and remarried again.) Next came A Thousand Acres, a modern retelling of King Lear set on an Iowa farm; it won not only that Pulitzer but a National Book Critics Circle Award. It was made into a film in 1997.

Basically Smiley’s genius has been unstoppable; she’s written nearly 30 books (novels, short story collections, YA novels, nonfiction), her fiction crosses a wide range of genres (try her academic comedy, Moo, 1995), and she’s a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.  A report card of Smiley’s from elementary school said, “Jane only does what she wants to do,” and it seems to have worked out well. Smiley has owned a number of racehorses and has been married to her fourth husband, Jack Canning, for over 15 years. Her most recent novel is Golden Age (2015), the third in a trilogy about an Iowa family.

Today only: post your favorite Jane Smiley novel or book in a comment and win a free racehorse.*

Have a green, warm, drippy Wednesday full of love and barbeque sauce and stay scrupulously honest to the data.

*Some restrictions apply.