“I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I’m independent, I’m not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I’m an old-fashioned amateur.”—Anne Fadiman
Born on August 7th, 1953, Anne Fadiman is the daughter of World War II correspondent Annalee Jacoby Fadiman. Anne Fadiman has written a plethora of essays on a wide range of topics, including linguistics, cultural stigmas, the Postal Service and ice cream. Her essays have been published in The New Yorker and in The New York Times among many others. Fadiman is currently an adjunct professor of English at Yale University, she is also the Francis Writer-in-Residency.
Fadiman’s 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award. Researched in a small county hospital in California, it examined a Hmong family from Laos with a child with epilepsy, and their cultural, linguistic, and medical struggles with the American medical system.
She has authored two books of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), a collection of essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, postal history, and ice cream, among other topics; it was the source of an unencrypted quotation in the New York Times Sunday Acrostic. She also edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005) and the Best American Essays 2003(2003).
Publications:
- At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007)
- Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998)
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, 1997
Edited:
- Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005)
- Best American Essays 2003 (2003).
- The American Scholar, Editor since 1997
Awards:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 1997
- National Book Critics Circle Award, 1997
