Barbara Kingsolver's World

A revised edition of Linda Wagner-Martin's comprehensive study of the novels, stories, essays, and poetry of American author Barbara Kingsolver. Now updated so that coverage runs from Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, through to her most recent, Demon Copperhead.

Author of the only biography of Barbara Kingsolver and a reader’s guide to The Poisonwood Bible, Wagner-Martin has become the leading authority on this Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Here she covers every work in Kingsolver’s oeuvre, emphasizing the writer’s blend of the scientific method, in which she was formally trained, with her convincing understanding of the human characters that fill her books.

What Kingsolver achieves throughout all her writing is a seamless blending of the various parts of human existence. She melds important themes through parts and pieces of the natural world—the African snakes, the Monarch butterflies, the coyotes in Deanna Wolfe’s existence. Repeatedly, Kingsolver writes to create both characters and the characters’ worlds, bringing all these pieces into masterful, and whole, realities.

This edition includes two new chapters—one on her 2018 novel, Unsheltered, and the second on her 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead—and is the first study of Kingsolver to publish since she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.