Lucia Berlin was a highly influential short story writer, although she did not gain much recognition during her lifetime. She was born on November 12, 1936, in Juneau, Alaska, and died on November 12, 2004, in Marina del Rey, California. Berlin was born Lucia Brown and spent her earliest years in various mining camps and towns due to her father's job as a mining engineer. She was educated in El Paso, Texas, and Santiago, Chile, before attending the University of New Mexico.
Berlin's writing career began in earnest in the 1960s, after she met the poet Edward Dorn, who became a significant influence on her work. She published her first small collection, "Angels Laundromat," in 1981, but many of her stories were written as early as 1960. Berlin's writing appeared in several magazines, including The Atlantic and The Noble Savage. She published six collections of short stories, with most of her work found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: "Homesick: New and Selected Stories," "So Long: Stories 1987-92," and "Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98." Berlin was never a bestseller but was widely admired within the literary community, with her work often compared to that of Raymond Carver and Richard Yates. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the Jack London Short Prize for her story "My Jockey" in 1985.
Despite her talent, Berlin did not achieve significant commercial success during her lifetime. However, posthumous recognition of her work came in 2015, 11 years after her death, when her short story collection "A Manual for Cleaning Women" became a surprise bestseller. The book, edited by Stephen Emerson, helped Berlin gain the recognition she deserved for her hard work as a writer. It was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year 2015 by The New York Times, and within a few weeks, it outsold the combined collection of all her previous books.