After receiving a Master of Science degree in 1981 from the University of Arizona, Kingsolver accepted a job at the university and began writing science articles. She also pursued additional graduate studies and took a writing class with author Francine Prose. It was then that she realized that she did not want to pursue a career in academia but, rather, wanted to write. She began working as a freelance scientific writer and journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Progressive, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Sonoran Review. Kingsolver also began writing short stories that have been published in Redbook, Mademoiselle, and anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1988; Florilegia, an Anthology of Art and Literature by Women; and Rebirth of Power.
Kingsolver began a nonfiction book in 1983 about the copper mine strike against the Phelps Dodge Corporation in Arizona. She spent hours interviewing union wives about their experiences during and after the strike. A year later, the book was only half finished, and because her agent was having trouble selling it, Kingsolver stopped working on the book and returned to freelance writing.
On April 15, 1985, Kingsolver married University of Arizona chemistry professor Joseph Hoffmann. She soon found herself pregnant and unable to sleep at night. Her doctor suggested that she scrub bathroom tiles with a toothbrush to battle her insomnia, but instead she sat in a closet and began writing her first novel, The Bean Trees. If her daughter, Camille, had not been born three weeks late, Kingsolver might never have finished The Bean Trees, published in 1988.
Supporting herself with the advance money from The Bean Trees, Kingsolver completed writing her nonfiction account of the Arizona mining strike. Published in 1989 by Cornell University Press, the work is titled Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. In 1989, she also published a collection of short stories, Homeland and Other Stories. She then went on to write the novels Animal Dreams (1990) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), a sequel to The Bean Trees; a best-selling collection of poetry, Another America: Otra America (1992); a collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now and Never (1995); and another novel, The Poisonwood Bible (1998).
