玛丽莲.罗宾逊（1943— ），美国当代著名女作家，生于爱达荷州，多年来一直在爱荷华大学教授写作，被公认为“作家中的作家”。1980年出版小说处女作《管家》，获得美国笔会/海明威奖，并获得1982年普利策小说奖提名。《管家》出版后的20余年里，她没有再涉足小说创作，而将注意力投向环保和美国当代思想领域的纷争。小说《基列家书》（2004）获2005年普利策小说奖，这也是奥巴马最爱的小说之一。《基列家书》的续篇《家园》（2008）获得2009年度橘子奖，并获得美国国家图书奖提名。《莱拉》（2014）可以被视为基列三部曲的结局，获洛杉矶时报图书奖，并入围美国国家图书奖的长名单。

此外，罗宾逊一直关注美国社会思想、实证主义和新教传统的关系，著有多部散文集《祖国 ：英国、福利社会和核污染》（1989）、《亚当之死：当代思想随笔》（1998）、《思维的缺失：消除自我之现代神话的本性》（2010）、《论事物的给定性》（2015） 。2013年，美国总统奥巴马亲自为她颁发国家人文奖章。

基列三部曲是罗宾逊最负盛名、技巧几近完美的作品，优雅而深邃地勾勒了人与人之间的伦理关系，也可以被视为美国国家和文化的一种自我疗愈过程，它用那些强有力的灵魂，呈现出美国失落已久的道德谱系。

2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten. "Gilead "is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.