With a sort of awkward and almost tiresome physical input that's always so very satisfying. She told Washington Post writer David Streitfeld of her love for places 'where things are still done In tiny backwoods towns in Vermont, Proulx indulged her passion for fishing, hunting, and canoeing and lived the self-made, from-scratch lifestyle suggested by her free-lance assignments. The financial rewards for such work were meager devoting time to writing short stories was a luxury-Proulx averaged two a year, nearly all of which were published. Another journalistic venture cast Proulx as the founder and editor of a rural newspaper, the Vershire Behind the Times, from 1984 to 1986. In the early 1980s Proulx produced a shelf full of on-assignment 'how-to' books on food, gardening, and carpentering, including Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It, The Fine Art of Salad Gardening, and Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives. She wrote articles for magazines on a myriad of topics, of which she offered these examples to Contemporary Authors: 'weather, apples, canoeing, mountain lions, mice, cuisine, libraries, African beadwork, cider and lettuces.' Her work appeared in publications such as Country Journal, Organic Gardening, and Yankee.

Proulx was transformed into a novelist after 19 years of work as a free-lance journalist. There was an overwhelmingly positive response to what Sara Rimer, writing for the New York Times, characterized as Proulx's 'offbeat, darkly comic voice and vivid sense of place.' From Free-lance Journalist to Novelist David Bradley, writing for the New York Times, dubbed Postcards an example of 'The Great American Novel.' This acclaim snowballed with the publication of The Shipping News, which garnered three major prizes for Proulx and brought comparisons to legendary authors William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and Herman Melville. The measure of her success was impressive with her first attempt at long-form fiction, Proulx won the respected PEN/Faulkner Award and the accolades of critics and fellow authors. Annie Proulx did present her own remarkable success story, one characterized by hard work and a fierce independence.

While she was certainly not an overnight sensation, having written stories from the age of ten and published short fiction since her early 20s, E. Annie Proulx (born 1935) won the 1993 PEN/ Faulkner Award for her novel Postcards and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her next novel, The Shipping News.

Annie proulx cider