An American fiction writer and academic, she is best known for short story collections such as Beautiful Girl (1979), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999). Her close to a dozen novels include Medicine Men (1997) and the 1984 bestselling work Superior Women. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946. Before publishing her first novel, Careless Love, in 1966, she worked briefly as a secretary.
