The Bean Trees
By
Barbara Kingsolver
Source: www.enotes.com
• 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.