Freelance journalist by trade, Proulx wrote short stories that are a testament to her observation skills and attention to details. Her stories are born out of immaculate research which engenders stories peppered with numerous realistic minutiae focusing on socio-economic and historical context of its geographical setting.
This is not to imply that Proulx’s short stories are dry, information-cluttered, cold and soulless pieces of fiction. Quite contrarily, her stories investigate the socio-cultural context of its fiction via nuanced and deep characters. The juxtaposition of the “personal” and the “public” are the key areas of conflicts. But it is through this friction that the readers get the glimpses of the warped tendencies of the society.
While Proulx is a Pulitzer Prize winning author – for her novel The Shipping News – her mainstream recognition resulted from the multiple Academy Award winning movie adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain” by Ang Lee. Before being added in Proulx’s collection of short stories Close Range, Wyoming Stories, which won New Yorker’s Book Award for Best Fiction in 2000, it was published in New Yorker in 1997. The short story itself has also won National Magazine Award and the O. Henry Prize in 1998.
