Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer.

He has written of his mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie."

He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings.

Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984.

He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984.

He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was written as his UC Irvine master's thesis.

Without telling Chabon, his professor, Donald Heiney (better known by his pen name, MacDonald Harris), sent it to a literary agent, who got the author an impressive $155,000 advance on the novel, though most first-time novelists receive advances under $7,500.

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and was a bestseller, instantly catapulting Chabon to literary celebrity.

Among his major literary influences in this period were Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Chandler, John Updike, Philip Roth and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.

Chabon was born in Washington, D.C., to a Jewish family.

His parents are Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer.

Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when, at the age of ten, he wrote his first short story for a class assignment.

When the story received an A, he recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."

Referring to popular culture, he wrote of being raised "on a hearty diet of crap".

His parents divorced when he was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, Maryland.

Columbia, where he lived nine months of the year with his mother, was "a progressive planned living community in which racial, economic, and religious diversity were actively fostered."

In 1991, he published A Model World, a collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in The New Yorker.

After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent five years working on a second novel, Fountain City, a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida."

It ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight.

The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, "never felt like I was conceptually on steady ground."

At one point, he submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work.

Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though.

"It was really scary," he said later.

He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections.

In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus.

It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.

In 2001, Chabon reflected on the success of his first novel by saying that while "the upside was that I was published and I got a readership, ... [the] downside ... was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, 'Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?' It took me a few years to catch up."

His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year.

As he remarked in 2010, "I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to, and I think that's probably the best way to learn."

Chabon was ambivalent about his newfound fame.

He turned down offers to appear in a Gap ad and to be featured as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People".

He later said of the People offer, "I don't give a shit [about it] ... I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, 'We want to put you in a magazine because the weather's so nice where you live.' "

In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004.

He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.

Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity.

He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work.