The Bean Trees By Barbara Kingsolver Source:

Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates that politics are personal in The Bean Trees, her novel of friendship and survival set in the arid American Southwest. The novel focuses on Taylor Greer's search for a new life as she moves from her dull Kentucky home to exotic Arizona and the lessons that she learns along the way. Taylor's adoption of an abused Cherokee toddler, her friendship with a pair of Guatemalan refugees, and her support system of a small community of women, all contribute to the novel's central conviction that people cannot survive without empathy and generosity.

Published in 1988 to an enthusiastic critical reception, The Bean Trees won an American Library Association award and a School Library Association award and has found a devoted reading audience around the world. Critics and readers alike relish Taylor's humor and warmth, with her down-home speech and perceptive observations.

Like her narrator, Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky, and she draws from the voices she heard in her youth to create Taylor's voice. This voice helps to guide the novel, with its strong humanitarian views, away from simple political correctness toward a rich believability. Kingsolver has been praised for her skill in The Bean Trees at walking the fine line between preaching and taking a moral stand, and Taylor's straightforwardness and humor provide the cornerstone to Kingsolver's approach.

Biographical Information Born in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky. She began writing as a young child, but chose to study biology in college at DePauw University. In her twenties she moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she eventually earned a graduate degree in ecology at the University of Arizona. Following graduate school, Kingsolver turned back to her life-long love—writing—and began writing nonfiction as a technical writer in a scientific program at the university.

By the mid-1980s she was writing and publishing short fiction. Her contact in Arizona with people from Latin America, particularly refugees, influenced Kingsolver's choice of subject matter when she turned to fiction. Published in 1988, The Bean Trees was her first novel.

Best known as a novelist, Kingsolver also writes poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction. She believes that fiction can be used as an instrument of social change, and her own fiction reflects this belief.

Kingsolver describes her political stance as that of a "human rights activist"; to pursue these interests, she belongs to Amnesty International and the Committee for Human Rights in Latin America, two humanitarian organizations that advance the cause of human rights around the world. In 1997 she established a literary prize, the Bellwether Prize, to be awarded every year to a first novel of exceptional literary distinction that also embodies this belief in fiction's power to change the world.

Kingsolver describes herself as a pantheist; pantheism is not an organized religion but is more a doctrine based upon the belief that the natural world is imbued with a divine presence. Rooted in her Kentucky childhood, she credits her interest in nature as having been a major influence on her life, and her work reflects her sense that the environment cannot be ignored.

In The Bean Trees, the dry Arizona landscape that manages to produce flowers and vegetables is central to the novel. It reflects the deprived lives of the characters who are able to flourish in spite of their difficult circumstances.

Kingsolver has won several literary awards for her work, among them an American Library Association award and a School Library Association award for The Bean Trees. Audiences around the world have responded warmly to The Bean Trees, as it has been translated into several languages and published in more than sixty-five countries.