Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.
From her Paris Review interview, conducted by Sarah Fay:
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that Housekeeping started as a series of metaphors you wrote while you were getting your Ph.D. in English literature?
ROBINSON
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I 
became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. When I entered the Ph.D. program, I started writing these metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected. I could see that I had created something that implied much more. So I started writing Housekeeping, and the characters became important for me. I told a friend of mine, a writer named John Clayton, that I had been working on this thing, and he asked to see it. The next thing I knew, I got a letter from his agent saying that she would be happy to represent it.
INTERVIEWER
Were you surprised?
ROBINSON
I was, but these things always came with little caveats....[read on]
Read
the complete interview.
--Marshal Zeringue
