Ann Beattie
[2] She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in The Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.She later became Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing in 2000 and remained at UVA until 2013, when she resigned over disappointment at the direction in which the university was heading.The first version was not well received by audiences, though upon its re-release in 1982, with a new title and ending to match that in the book,[5] the movie was successful, and is now considered a cult classic.Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called her novel Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011) "preposterous," "narcissistic," and "self-indulgent"—the "sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics."[8] In The Washington Post, Book World Editor Marie Arana characterized it as "a bill of goods" devoid of "anything resembling a story line" that is "less about the eponymous Mrs. than about an endless parade of wordsmiths trotted out for show.""[10] By contrast, Dawn Raffel, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called the book "splendidly tricky", "at times... movingly lyrical", and said "Nothing in Mrs. Nixon is perfectly clear, and that is the source of its power.Southgate nonetheless praised A Wonderful Stroke of Luck for "some elegant sentences and cutting observations that remind a reader of Beattie at her strongest.