Jane Smiley books

Anthologies

Collections

Ellen and Ned Reading Order

Horses Of Oak Valley Ranch Reading Order

Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Penguin Lives Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Warmer Collection Reading Order

Jane Smiley has written across a wide range of forms, from literary fiction and children’s books to non-fiction and biography. Her standalone novels include A Thousand Acres (1991), which retells King Lear on an Iowa farm, as well as The Greenlanders (1988), Good Faith (2003), and the more recent A Dangerous Business (2022) and Lucky (2024). She has been publishing fiction since Barn Blind in 1980, and her novel output alone covers more than four decades.

Her non-fiction includes studies of Charles Dickens, the novel as a form (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), and a biography of computing pioneer John Atanasoff. The Penguin Lives series, where she contributed the Charles Dickens volume, is a large biographical collection with entries on figures from Abraham Lincoln to Elvis Presley. On the children’s fiction side, the Horses of Oak Valley Ranch series (2009-2013) and the Ellen and Ned series (2018-2020) are aimed at younger readers who love horses. The Last Hundred Years trilogy (2014-2015) follows an Iowa farm family across the 20th century. With 88 books across ten series, Smiley’s catalog covers literary fiction, children’s adventures, essays, and biography with equal range.