How Barbara Kingsolver shaped a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel out of Kentucky roots
A young Barbara Kingsolver would more likely be found with a book rather than watching the family’s staticky television, courtesy of encouragement from her academic parents.
Kingsolver might also have been marching in the band at a school football game, taking in the view on a camping trip or traveling to faraway places while her father donated his time as a physician, according to brother Rob Kingsolver.
No matter where she went, however, Barbara Kingsolver’s path always led her back to Appalachia, the setting of her most recent book.
The journalist and author won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her work on “Demon Copperhead,” a novel she said answers questions regarding how an opioid crisis was spawned in the region due to corporate pharmaceutical companies’ peddling addictive drugs.
“I had no idea how to tell it because it’s not necessarily a story people want to hear — even here in Appalachia,” she said. “We don’t want to hear about how we’ve been exploited.”
Charles Dickens’ Victorian-age novel “David Copperfield” became the inspiration for Kingsolver’s 2022 novel, after spending a weekend in his former home, Bleak House, located in Kent, England.
“I realized that I could probably lay my novel right on top of his, and it would be really hard, and also really fun to try to take each of those characters, each of those plot devices and scenes – episodes – and translate them into something that could happen in, and does happen, in my home of Southwest Virginia.”
Kingsolver's Kentucky roots are strong
Virginia is Kingsolver's home, but her roots in Kentucky are strong. She experienced what many young Appalachians go through after leaving for more urban places, an increasing need to code switch − how people change the way they express themselves. Kingsolver said her Kentucky accent was an epiphany of how outsiders viewed Appalachians at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.
“I went to college in Indiana and found everybody laughing at me, laughing at my accent,” she said. “I made the mistake of joining the debate team where the judges corrected every single word that I said. I didn't know that we were the laughingstock of the world.”
Kingsolver found her voice “hungrily reading” fellow Appalachian authors such as Harriet Arnow and Bobbie Ann Mason and then eventually Affrilachian author Frank X Walker and Cherokee writer Annette Clapsaddle.
Kingsolver has authored novels about “a lot of different kinds of people set in a lot of kinds of places.” Her 1998 novel “The Poisonwood Bible”, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, is the story of a young girl living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1950s. “The Lacuna” introduces Harrison Shepherd and Mexico City in the 1930s.
Kingsolver's travels to places, including living in the Congo, couldn't separate her identity from home, though.
“I've always been the writer from Carlisle, Kentucky,” Kingsolver said. “The person in me who is the underdog, and who feels sort of fiercely protective of the underdogs, is in everything that I write.”
In fact, Kingsolver’s reading has brought her full circle to a new project. She’s working on a “literary landscape of Appalachia,” and the same authors who have previously inspired her are guiding her toward others to fill in the gaps in her understanding of Appalachian literature.
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The Pulitzer Prize has brought in thousands of well-wishes for the author, and she said it feels “amazing,” but underscored that “what's beautiful about literary fiction is that it's an individual fit.”
“It misleads people,” she said. “It sort of makes other people think that good novels can be objectively ranked when they can't. If I never put much stock in prizes, I guess I’m not supposed to do that now.”
Awards Kingsolver recieved throughout her career
Kingsolver was a science writer at the University of Arizona during her mid to late 20s when she decided to quit and pursue writing full time. She published her first novel, “The Bean Trees,” at 32.
“The Bean Trees” follows Taylor Greer from rural Kentucky to Arizona, and as the narrator of her first novel, Kingsolver said that’s one of the characters who has followed her closely.
“She didn't want to leave. I actually had to kind of nail her into the closet so that she would quit telling every story in my head and I could find other narrators,” she said.
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In addition to an American Library Association and a School Library Association award for her first novel, Kingsolver has racked up additional honors including the National Humanities Medal, PEN / Faulkner award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
For Kingsolver, Appalachia is everywhere, and her love of the land and culture have kept her rooted there.
“We also have water flowing out of the mountain and food growing out of the ground. That’s a place you’d like to be,” she said.
Contact reporter Rae Johnson at RNJohnson@gannett.com. Follow them on Twitter at @RaeJ_33