Edna Buchanan was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MA in Journalism from Columbia University. At eighteen, she became a newsroom stenographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and remained there for ten years
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She was also a proofreader for the New York Daily News. Her first novel, The Night Comes On (1987), was the winner of the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was later made into a film starring Linda Fiorentino and Sam Shepard.
Edna's second novel, The Ice Storm, won a Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She also wrote a collection of short stories, The Pickle Tree (1992), and a play, The Dark Pageant (1988).