[close] Andrea Barrett is an acclaimed American writer. Barrett received her B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. She began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction and her work reflects her lifelong interest in science as many of her characters are scientists, often nineteenth-century biologists. Barrett currently teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She was also a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She currently lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Like Faulkner's, her characters sometimes appear in more than one story or novel. In an appendix to The Air We Breathe Barrett supplied a family tree making clear the relationships that begin in Ship Fever. Although each novel and story is self-contained, the writing gains an added dimension when the reader is familiar with the characters' previous histories.

(Biography obtained from Wikipedia.) [close]