Jonathan Franzen was born in
1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of
St. Louis. A fascination with the sciences hangs over much of Franzen’s early
writing. Jonathan Franzen struggled to come to terms with the purpose of
writing fiction after his first two novels won critical praise but
dishearteningly few readers.
Those struggles were the subject of much of the searching nonfiction he wrote during the nineties, and his midcareer masterpiece The Corrections (2001) was the outcome. The expansive saga of a disjointed Midwestern family, The Corrections won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and introduced Franzen, then a relatively obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the broad audience of readers he had long been seeking—a broader audience than any literary novelist of his generation. A Time Magazine cover proclaimed him the “Great American Novelist” who “shows us the way we live now.”
Those struggles were the subject of much of the searching nonfiction he wrote during the nineties, and his midcareer masterpiece The Corrections (2001) was the outcome. The expansive saga of a disjointed Midwestern family, The Corrections won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and introduced Franzen, then a relatively obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the broad audience of readers he had long been seeking—a broader audience than any literary novelist of his generation. A Time Magazine cover proclaimed him the “Great American Novelist” who “shows us the way we live now.”
Jonathan Franzen is the author of
four novels (Freedom, The Corrections, Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh
City), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How to Be Alone), a personal
history (The Discomfort Zone), and a translation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring
Awakening, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz,
California.
by Zuzanna Ludwa
