Atwood Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian author, poet, critic, feminist and social campaigner. While she may be best known for her work as a novelist, she is also an award winning poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. (Wikipedia, Atwood, page 1).
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to Carl, an entomologist, and Margaret Killam Atwwod, a dietitian. From infancy to her late adolescence, Atwood spent at least half of the year living in the wilderness of northern Ontario and Quebec, where her father conducted research on forest insects for the government. In 1946, the family moved to Toronto, where Atwood’s father held a university position. Graduating from Toronto’s Leaside High School in 1957, Atwood attended the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and entered the English honors program. Studying under well-known critic Northrop Frye, she was introduced to the mythical verse of William Blake, one of her strongest poet influences. As an undergraduate she wrote for the college literary magazine and her first poem was published at age nineteen. In 1961, the year she graduated from college, Atwood published her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, which won the E.J. Pratt Medal. She went on to earn her M.A. at Radcliff College, studying Victorian literature, and also took classes at Harvard University. In 1962, she returned to Toronto and worked at a marketing research firm. Atwood taught English literature at colleges in Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto. She has been married two times. Her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale won a Governor General’s award, along with the Commonwealth Literature Prize and the Arthur C. Clark Award for Best Science Fiction. (Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 246, page 91).
Margaret Atwood’s background in literature and her passion for writing allowed her to write The Handmaid’s Tale. Although, at the time she wrote this book, it was much different from her previous works. In her early work, she compares and contrasts animals and humans worlds. The Handmaid’s tale is a futuristic fantasy, a cautionary tale, and a feminist tract. The story takes place in Gilead, a dystopian version of a future America, in which fundamentalist Christians have killed the president and imposed their own dictatorial rule. In this society, which has been polluted by toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation, few women can reproduce. Those women who can bear children are forced to become handmaids, or official breeders. The narrator is on the Handmaids, and like others of her class, she bears the name of Commander to whom she is temporarily assigned. (Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 246, Page 92)
Margaret Atwood is a talented author in that she allows you to see into her vivid, imaginative world, the subjection of these women. In The Handmaid’s tale she allows you to see the oppression of the handmaids, the humiliation of the wives and the world in which they live. Their hopelessness is very obvious, only because of her ability to allow you to see through her words on the page. The burden of carrying the children for the wives, the envy they feel for the handmaids is stoic. Even though this is a futuristic story, it is thrilling in some ways and disturbing in others. To think that women could be treated this way is troublesome in light of the fact that women were oppressed for many years. Women suffered for years without rights of any kind, merely as the property of men. Women were not valued much, nor were they valued in The Handmaid’s Tale. Women have come a long way. Atwood, in writing The Handmaid’s Tale took women back to the time before women’s rights and to know a little about her history, you can forgive her because she is a feminist herself and writes other stories that uplift women and give them the power they didn’t have in The Handmaid’s Tale. 
Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret “The Hanmaid’s Tale,” Houghton Mifflin Publishing, New York (1986)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347065 (7/23/2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood (7/19/2010)