Jane Hamilton

Above: Jane Hamilton at the 2007 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas. Photo by Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jane Hamilton - Apple farmer, novelist; born on July 13, 1957 in Oak Park, Illinois but has lived in Rochester, Wisconsin since 1979.   Kovic is best known as the author of his 1976 memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, which was made into an Academy Award–winning film in 1989 directed by Oliver Stone.

Hamilton graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1979. Hamilton was accepted as an intern with Dell Publishing for Children after college and set out for New York with intention of becoming an editor. Hamilton needed money for her plans so she stopped off to help a friend with the apple harvest at a farm in Rochester, Wisconsin (a relatively isolated community in the southeastern part of the state). It was there that she met her future husband, a partner in the orchard operation. Her plan was to stay for a week, but she never left. Hamilton became a farmer, wife, mother, and writer — writing from her orchard farmhouse.

Hamilton's first novel, "The Book of Ruth", was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title.

In 1994, she published "A Map of the World", which was adapted for a film in 1999 and the same year was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, "The Short History of a Prince", published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.

All of her books are set, at least in part, in Wisconsin. "A Map of the World" is set in Racine County, Wisconsin.

For more information on Jane Hamilton, visit Wikipedia.