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|  | | Jonathan Franzen
Best known for his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen is equally adept at turning out elegant essays, social commentary, and cultural criticism.
 Read the biography
Read Book magazine's profile
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Fact File
| Name:
Jonathan Franzen
Current Home:
New York, New York
Date of Birth:
1959
Place of Birth:
Western Springs, Illinois
| | Education:
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1981; studied as a Fulbright scholar at Freie Universität in Berlin
Awards:
National Book Award, 2001; Whiting Writer’s Award, 1988; American Academy’s Berlin Prize, 2000; Named one of “Twenty Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, and one of the “Best American Novelists Under 40" by Granta
Jonathan Franzen's official web site
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Getting Personal
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| | The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
by
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
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Franzen's Contemporaries
| In 1996, the British literary magazine Granta announced its "Best American Novelists Under 40," a heavily debated list of what purported to be the States' top 20 writers. The list generated as much criticism as it did attention, but it was also prescient: Franzen, after all, was on that list (well before The Corrections), and so were other now-well-known literary big names.
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Recommended by Franzen
| 'More Than Just a Story'
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| | You Are Not a Stranger Here
by
Adam Haslett
Franzen picked Haslett's debut story collection as the second book club selection for the Today show. "Adam Haslett is a wonderful rarity: an old-fashioned young storyteller with something urgent and fresh and fiercely intelligent to say," Franzen says.
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16.00
| | Catch-22
by
Joseph Heller
Looking back on his "death of the social novel" flap, Franzen told the The Atlantic in 2001 that what he had in mind was a book like Catch-22, "which cut deeply enough into the country's consciousness to create its own dictionary entry."
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| | Photo by Greg Martin |
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