Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist.

As part of his undergraduate education, he studied abroad in Germany during the 1979–80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich program.

While there, he met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base the character Walter Berglund in Freedom.

Franzen grew up in an affluent neighborhood, on 83 Webster Woods Drive in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College, receiving a degree in German in 1981.

He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981–82; he speaks fluent German.

Franzen was married in 1982 and moved with his wife to Somerville, Massachusetts to pursue a career as a novelist.

While writing his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, he worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring several dozen papers.

In September 1987, a month after he and his wife moved to New York City, Franzen sold The Twenty-Seventh City to Farrar Straus & Giroux.

The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, is set in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, and deals with the city's fall from grace, St. Louis having been the "fourth city" in the 1870s.

This sprawling novel was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch.

In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb Magazine, Franzen described The Twenty-Seventh City as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns", adding in a later interview "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."

Strong Motion (1992) focuses mainly on a dysfunctional family, the Hollands, and uses seismic events on the American East Coast as a metaphor for the quakes that occur in family life (as Franzen put it, "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other." ). A 'systems novel', the key 'systems' of Strong Motion according to Franzen are "... the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world."

The novel was not a financial success at the time of its publication.

Franzen taught a fiction-writing seminar at Swarthmore in the spring of 1992 and 1994:

For the 1992 class, Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to be a guest judge of the workshop pieces.

Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994.

"On that first day of class, Franzen wrote two words on the blackboard: 'truth' and 'beauty,' and told his students that these were the goals of fiction. Haslett describes Franzen's classroom manner as 'serious.' 'He meant what he said and didn't suffer fools gladly.' But this seriousness was leavened by a 'great relish for words and writing,' adds Kathleen Lawton-Trask '96, a 1994 workshop student who is now a writer and high school English teacher. 'People who teach fiction workshops aren't always starry-eyed about writing, but he was. He read our stories so closely that he often started class with a rundown of words that were not used quite correctly in stories from that week's workshop. (I still remember him explaining to us the difference between cement and concrete.) At the same time, he was eminently supportive and sympathetic; I don't remember those corrections ever feeling condescending.'"

His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature.

His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.

Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen.

His father, raised in Minnesota, was the son of an immigrant from Sweden; his mother's ancestry was Eastern European.

Franzen's The Corrections, a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States, winning both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction

The novel was also a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (won by Richard Russo for Empire Falls).

In September 2001, The Corrections was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club.

Franzen initially participated in the selection, sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah and appearing in B-roll footage in his hometown of St. Louis (described in an essay in How To Be Alone titled "Meet Me In St. Louis").

In October 2001, however, The Oregonian printed an article in which Franzen expressed unease with the selection.

In an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, he expressed his worry that the Oprah logo on the cover dissuaded men from reading the book:

"I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say 'If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.' Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation."

Soon afterward, Franzen's invitation to appear on Oprah's show was rescinded.

Winfrey announced, "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book."

These events gained Franzen and his novel widespread media attention.

The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction.

At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen said "I'd also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."

Following the success of The Corrections and the publication of The Discomfort Zone and How to Be Alone, Franzen began work on his next novel.

and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

In the interim, he published two short stories in The New Yorker: "Breakup Stories", published November 8, 2004, concerned the disintegration of four relationships; and "Two's Company", published May 23, 2005, concerned a couple who write for TV, then split up.

His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist".

Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.

Franzen subsequently defended the novel in his 2010 Paris Review interview, remarking "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."