Marilynne Robinson, author of the novel Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, offered a series of four lectures "Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self." Presentation of this lecture, entitled "Thinking Again" was made on April 2, 2009.
Ms. Robinson is also the author of Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Housekeeping was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, Home, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.
Ms. Robinson, who currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award in 1990 and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts in 1998. She is the author of two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam.
Absence of Mind, the book based on her Terry lectures, is available from Yale University Press.
