Literary Ruralism (Part XV): Annie Proulx's comments on rural North America

This is from an interview Proulx did with the New Yorker in 1999 in which she commented on some of her literary influences.

Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time.

This interview came two years after the magazine published Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain."  Here's the opening paragraph from that story:

They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road, leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper, and bad tires; when the transmission went, there was no money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.

Brokeback Mountain was, of course, made into a film released in 2005.

I'd say Proulx's 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Shipping News, also nicely lives up to her "difficult circumstances of place and time" description. 

According to amazon.com, Proulx lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland, the places these two stories are set.