faith in society. Personal life Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin have been important in many of her novels, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker." In 1967 she married Fred Miller Robinson, a writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Robinsons divorced in 1989. The couple had two sons. In the late 1970s, she wrote Housekeeping in the evenings while they slept. Robinson said they influenced her writing in many ways, since changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself." Robinson still lives in Iowa City, and spends the summers with family in upstate New York. Bibliography Fiction Housekeeping (1980) , Gilead (2004) , Home (2008) , Lila (2014) , Jack (2020) , Online fiction Jack and Della - published in The New Yorker on July 13, 2020 Kansas - published in The New Yorker on September 6, 2004 Nonfiction Books Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) , The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) , Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) , When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015) , What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (2018) , Essays and reporting "On Edgar Allan Poe", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 2 (February 5, 2015), pp. 4, 6. Interviews A September 2015 interview with Barack Obama in Des Moines, Iowa, recorded by the New York Review of Books and published in the October issues of the magazine in two parts Awards 1982: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel for Housekeeping 1982: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction shortlist for Housekeeping 1989: National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution 1999: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for The Death of Adam 2004: National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Gilead 2005: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead