Elizabeth Gilbert Biography and Photos

Elizabeth M. Gilbert (born July 18, 1969 in Waterbury, Connecticut) is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer, biographer and memoirist.

Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a nurse. Along with her only sister, novelist and historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors, and they didn’t own a TV or even a record player. Consequently, they all read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing little books and plays. She attended New York University and graduated in 1991 with a BA in Political Science, after which she lived the life of a literary vagabond — experiencing life as a cook, a waitress, and a magazine lackey — in order to write about it. Her experiences as a cook on a dude ranch found their way into both short stories and her book The Last American Man (Viking 2002).

Esquire published Gilbert's short story “Pilgrims” in 1993, under the headline, “The Debut of an American Writer.” She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines including, SPIN, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.

Her 1997 GQ article, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon," a memoir of Gilbert’s career as a bartender in a lowdown East Village dive, was the basis for the film Coyote Ugly. She adapted her 1998 GQ article, "Eustace Conway is Not Like Any Man You've Ever Met," into a biography of the modern naturalist, The Last American Man. It received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction. "The Ghost," a profile of Hank Williams III published by GQ in 2000, was included in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.

Her first book Pilgrims (Houghton-Mifflin 1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by her novel Stern Men (Houghton-Mifflin 2000), selected by The New York Times as a "Notable Book".

Most recently, she published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking, 2006), a chronicle of the author's year of spiritual and personal exploration while traveling abroad. The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller list of non-fiction in the spring of 2006, and in October, 2008, after 88 weeks, the book was still on the list at # 2 , and subsequently she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show .The book has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Julia Roberts slated to star.