Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve was an accomplished American author, well-known for her women's fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, romantic fiction, psychological thrillers, family saga, and non-fiction works. She was born in October 1945 and grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, the eldest of three daughters. Shreve's early literary influences included reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton as a junior in high school and everything Eugene O'Neill wrote as a senior, which she believes instilled a dark streak in her own work.

After graduating from Tufts University, Shreve taught high school for several years in and around Boston. In the middle of her last year, she quit her job to start writing, driven by a panicky sensation that it was now or never. She began by publishing her short stories in literary journals, and one of her earliest published stories, 'Past the Island, Drifting' (1975), won an O. Henry Prize in 1976. However, she soon realized that one could not make a living writing short fiction and switched to journalism. Shreve spent three years working as a journalist in Kenya, an experience that later influenced her novel, 'The Last Time They Met.' Upon returning to the United States, she worked as a writer and editor for several magazines in New York before turning to freelancing. She published her first novel, 'Eden Close,' in 1989, and went on to write 14 more novels, including 'The Weight of Water' and 'The Pilot's Wife,' both of which were adapted into films.

Shreve received numerous awards for her work, including the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction in 1998, and had two of her novels selected for Oprah's Book Club. She was married to a man she met when she was 13 and had two children and three stepchildren. Shreve passed away on March 29, 2018, at her home in Newfields, New Hampshire, due to cancer. She was 71 years old.