Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained an A.B. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Career

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script, produced for an episode of Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to 21st-century American women's literature.

From 1981 to 1996, Smiley taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University, continuing to teach there even after relocating to California.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She participates in the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in association with UCLA. Smiley chaired the judges' panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

Novels

• Barn Blind (1980)
• At Paradise Gate (1981)
• Duplicate Keys (1984)
• The Greenlanders (1988)
• Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)
• A Thousand Acres (1991)
• Moo (1995)
• The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998)
• Horse Heaven (2000)
• Good Faith (2003)
• Ten Days in the Hills (2007)
• The Georges and the Jewels (2009)
• Private Life (2010)

Story collections

• The Age of Grief (1987)

Non-fiction

• Charles Dickens (2003)
• A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (2004)
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005)

Articles

• "So shall we reap - Great North American Prairie Ecoregion" Sierra Magazine (April/March 1994)
• "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece'" Harper's Magazine 292.1748 (Jan. 1996): 61-67. (1995)
• "And Moo to You Too" Civilization 2.6 (1995): 75.

Essays

• The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal includes "Iowa Was Never Like This"

Television

• "In Search of Crimes Past", episode of Life on the Street (teleplay; story by Henry Bromell & Julie Martin) (1995)