Paulette Jiles, the author known for her novels about the American west, has died at 82, the San Antonio Express-News reports.
Jiles was born in Salem, Missouri, and raised in small towns across the state. She was educated at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and worked as a journalist in Canada for eight years.
She published her first book, the short story collection Waterloo Express, in 1973. Several books followed, including the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, and Lighthouse Island.
In 2016, she published the novel News of the World, about a news reader in post–Civil War Texas who agrees to transport an orphan to her family in San Antonio. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted into 2020 film directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel.
Jiles’ most recent novel, Chenneville, was published in 2023.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye told the Express-News, “Paulette was a master in every genre. That’s really rare. She was such an idiosyncratic, stubborn, quirky, always original human. There was no way anyone could get her to do anything she didn’t want to do. I just have the highest esteem for all of her writing, for herself, for anything she ever did.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
