Best Of: Barbara Kingsolver on ‘Urban-Rural Antipathy’
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What inspired Barbara Kingsolver to write the Pulitzer‑winning novel *Demon Copperhead*?
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Today I want to share one of my favorite conversations from our archives. This is from 2023. It's with Barbara Kingsolver about her amazing book Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and her work to write the great novel of Appalachia. I hope you enjoy. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show.
So in 2023, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by two novels, Trust by Hernán Díaz and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. And Kingsolver, I think, is a literary legend in her own time. I mean, she wrote The Bean Trees. She wrote The Poisonwood Bible. She has won all kinds of prizes. But I think it's fair to say Demon Copperhead is a kind of masterpiece. And it's a kind of masterpiece she was trying to create. She set out to write, as she tells me in this conversation, she was setting out to write the great novel of Appalachia. And I think she did.
Yeah.
And this is a novel that is following loosely in the structure of David Copperfield by Dickens. It's a novel set a little bit back in time. I think that so much of our thinking now about this is political and places that go for Trump and places that don't go for Trump. But the novel is set in the 90s and in the 2000s, so a little bit before some of the current economic and political cleavages attain at least the form we know them in. And it's a beautiful book. It's a wrenching book. It's a book that I routinely had to stop reading because I was so fused with the character and so fused with the story. that when I could see something bad coming, I just couldn't handle it before bed. I just couldn't go through that with the main character.
So, I mean, that I think is about as much as you can say for fiction when it almost feels more real than the life you're living. So I was grateful she was willing to come on the show and talk a bit about her life, how she came to writing the novel, the sort of experiences she brought to it, and the kind of argument she's trying to have through it. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Barbara Kingsolver, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
So you've said that you're Appalachian through and through. What does that mean to you?
I'm Appalachian. And it's a funny thing. It's a marker. Appalachian means you say, I live in Appalachia. It's a region that's a little hard to pin down on a map because it includes parts of a lot of states, starting from North Georgia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and Virginia, up into the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, and then up into sort of the ridge country of Pennsylvania. So that sounds complicated, but to us, it is a whole place. We're more connected with each other culturally and geographically than we are with the far ends of our own states. It's a place and it's a mindset. We are connected by our mountains, our economies, and the fact that for a couple of centuries, we have been treated almost like an internal colony of the U.S.
We have suffered the exploitation of... Extractive industries managed by and profited from outside companies that come in and take what they can and leave a mess. So it started out with the timber industry. Then it was coal. Then it was tobacco. And now the latest car in this coal train of exploitations has been the opioid epidemic, which was, again, quite deliberately perpetrated on us as a vulnerable population.
We're going to come back very much to the opioid epidemic. But before we do, I want to talk a bit about just your geographic history, because you grew up in Kentucky, but then moved to the Congo.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Barbara Kingsolver to write the Pulitzer‑winning novel *Demon Copperhead*?
0:00–6:35
2
How does Kingsolver define her Appalachian identity and why does it matter for the story?
6:35–14:21
3
What experiences shaped Kingsolver’s view of the opioid crisis in Appalachia?
14:21–22:34
4
How does the novel portray the tension between community support and community harm?
22:34–29:57
5
Why does Kingsolver see the urban‑rural divide as a political and cultural antipathy?
29:57–38:54
6
What role does the concept of “the juice economy” play in the book’s depiction of Appalachia?
38:54–48:11
7
How does Kingsolver act as an ambassador between Appalachian and city worlds?
48:11–55:56
8
Which three books does Kingsolver recommend for readers wanting deeper insight into Appalachia and its challenges?
55:56–1:03:23