Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952) is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.

Early life and education

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and raised on Long Island, New York. Her grandmother was Russian. She graduated from high school in 1969, and then from Adelphi University with a Bachelor of Arts. She was a Mirrielees Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center in 1973 and 1974, where she earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

Career

When Hoffman was twenty-one and studying at Stanford, her first short story, At The Drive-In, was published in Volume 3 of the literary magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff contacted her, and asked whether she had a novel. At that point, she began writing her first novel, Property Of. It was published in 1977, by Farrar Straus and Giroux, now a division of Macmillan Publishers. A section of Property Of was published in Solotaroff's literary magazine, American Review.