Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman (born 1967) is an American writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Allegra Goodman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Hawaii.

The daughter of Lenn and Madeleine Goodman, she was brought up as a Conservative Jew.

Goodman graduated from Punahou School in 1985.

She then went on to Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. degree.

Her mother, who died in 1996, was a professor of genetics and women's studies, then assistant vice president at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for many years, before moving on to Vanderbilt University in the 1990s.

Her father, Lenn E. Goodman, is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt.

Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven.

She then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where Goodman earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature, in 1996.

Goodman's younger sister, Paula Fraenkel, is an oncologist.

Fraenkel's experience in research labs is one of the inspirations for Goodman's 2006 novel Intuition.

Her short story "La Vita Nuova" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2011 and was broadcast on Public Radio International's Selected Shorts in February 2012.

Goodman met her husband, David Karger, at Harvard.

Both were regulars at Harvard Hillel, and prayed in Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan.

Goodman and Karger live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Karger is a professor in computer science at MIT.

They have four children, three boys and a girl.

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