Alice Hoffman spent years crafting novels that explored relationships and magical realism before the “overnight” success of 1995’s Practical Magic catapulted her to success. Hoffman graduated from Adelphi University before earning an MA in creative writing from Stanford University in 1974. At age 21, while at Stanford, she published her first short story, “At the Drive In,” in Fiction and began writing her first novel, Property Of, which was published in 1977. Since then she has written a new book almost every year, as well as the screenplay for the 1983 film Independence Day, about a woman artist trapped in a provincial town. The success of Practical Magic, which was turned into a 1998 movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, made Hoffman a household name. Several of her novels delve into events in Jewish history, including 2006’s Incantation, a YA novel about the Spanish Inquisition, 2011’s The Dovekeepers, about the siege at Masada, 2015’s The Marriage of Opposites, about the forbidden love of the artist Pissarro’s parents, and 2019’s The World We Knew, about a golem and a young girl fleeing Nazi Germany. She continues to be a prolific author and in September 2024 is set to release her newest novel, When We Flew Away, an imagining of Anne Frank’s life before her family went into hiding. After surviving breast cancer, Hoffman donated the advance of her 1999 novel Local Girls to fund the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA.