She obtained an AB in literature at Vassar College (1971), then earned an MA (1975), MFA (1976), and PhD (1978) from the University of Iowa.

Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.

Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars[4] by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner.

She won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006,[5] and chaired the judges' panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

[6] Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections (2001), considers Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.