Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer (born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist.

Safran Foer attended Georgetown Day School and in 1994 traveled to Israel with other North American Jewish teenagers in a program sponsored by Bronfman youth fellowships.

In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy."

Safran Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."

Safran Foer graduated with an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton in 1999 after completing a 40-page-long senior thesis, titled "Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author", under the supervision of Gideon Rosen.

Oates served as the advisor to Safran Foer's creative writing senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran.

For his thesis, Safran Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.

After graduating from Princeton, Safran Foer briefly attended the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.

Safran Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a degree in philosophy, and traveled to Ukraine to expand his thesis.

In 2001, he edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe".

The book earned him a National Jewish Book Award (2001) and a Guardian First Book Award (2002).

He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019).

He teaches creative writing at New York University.

Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., as the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.

Safran Foer is the middle son of a Jewish family.

His older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is the founder of Atlas Obscura and of Sefaria.

Safran Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."

His Princeton thesis grew into a novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002.

Safran Foer shared the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize with fellow authors Will Heinrich and Monique Truong in 2004.

In 2005, Liev Schreiber wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel, which starred Elijah Wood.

Safran Foer's second novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, was published in 2005.

In it, Safran Foer used 9/11 as a backdrop for the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell, who learns how to deal with the death of his father in the World Trade Center.

The novel used writing techniques known as visual writing.

It follows multiple but interconnected storylines, is peppered with photographs of doorknobs and other such oddities, and ends with a 14-page flipbook.

Safran Foer's use of these techniques resulted in both praise and excoriation from critics.

Warner Bros. and Paramount turned the novel into a film, produced by Scott Rudin and directed by Stephen Daldry.

Safran Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera on September 14, 2005.

In 2008, Safran Foer taught writing for the first time as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University.

, he teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.

In 2009, Safran Foer published his third book, Eating Animals.

A New York Times bestseller, Eating Animals provides a morally dense discussion of some of the ramifications that followed the proliferation of factory farms.

It attempts to explain why and how humans can be so loving to our companion animals while simultaneously being indifferent to others, and explores what this inconsistency tells us about ourselves―what kinds of stories emerge from this selectivity.

The book offers a significant focus on "storytelling"―the title of both the first and the last chapters of the book.

Storytelling is Safran Foer's way of recognizing and dealing with the complexity of the subject that is eating animals, and suggests that, ultimately, our food choices tell stories about who we are, or, as Safran Foer has it in his book, "stories about food are stories about us―our history and our values."

Safran Foer published his third novel, Tree of Codes, in November 2010.

In March 2012, The New American Haggadah, edited by Safran Foer and translated by Nathan Englander, was released to mixed reviews.

In May 2012, Safran Foer signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown.

His novel, Escape From Children's Hospital, was due for publication in 2014, but is no longer on the publisher's schedule.

In September 2016, he released the novel Here I Am.

In 2019, as part of the book tour for We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Safran Foer took part in an on stage conversation with Samin Nosrat about eating and climate change.