Alice Hoffman Biography
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long
Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi
University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees
Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she
attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently
lives in Boston and New York.
Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of
twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter
by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert
J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to
publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted
Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she
quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of
which was published in Mr. Solotaroff's magazine, American Review.
Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most
distinguished novelists. She has published over twenty novels, two
books of short fiction, and ten books for children and young adults. Her
novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking
of some of the themes of Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights.
Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock
and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing
with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and
secondary schools. Hoffman's advance from Local Girls, a collection of
inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help
create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA.
Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape
Cod.
Hoffman's more recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo,
novels for pre-teens, and The New York Times bestsellers The River
King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice
Queen. Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and
love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an
Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. In 2007 Little
Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews
during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as
one of the best books of the year. In January 2007, Skylight Confessions,
a novel about one family's secret history, was released on the 30th anniversary
of the publication of Hoffman's first novel.
Hoffman's work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than
one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books
of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly,
The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine.
She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original
screenplay Independence Day, a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest.
Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times,
The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Redbook,
Architectural Digest, Gourmet, Self, and other
magazines. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film
starring Emma Roberts in 2006.
This biography was last updated on 04/02/2012.
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