Writing America

By Simon Garfield

There are several reasons why you might want to be E. Annie Proulx, mostly to do with her talent as a writer of elemental novels such as “The Shipping News”. But now there is another one: being E. Annie Proulx means having practically the whole of Wyoming to yourself.

If you were Emily Dickinson or John Cheever, you would have to contend with being squeezed alongside fellow east-coasters such as J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton. If you were Norman Mailer, you would have an even bigger problem – thanks to a British bookseller with a sideline in cartography called Geoff Sawers. “I was never really a fan of Mailer,” Sawers says. “And if I had put in Mailer then I’d have had to sacrifice someone else, so he didn’t make it.”