Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1981. This book and subsequent works established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years.

She has also published two collections of poetry, Woman before an Aquarium, and Resort and Other Poems.  In 1987 she published Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak's summer in Iowa, with engravings by Steven Sorman. Virgin Time, a memoir about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 1992 (paperback Ballantine, 1993, new paperback from Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2005). In 2001, Resort and Other Poems was reissued by Carnegie Mellon University Press, as part of its Contemporary Classics series in American poetry.

In 1999, W.W. Norton published I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, as well as a new edition of A Romantic Education with a post-Cold War “Afterword” in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. I Could Tell You Stories was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Awards in the category of General Nonfiction in 2000.

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