Jonathan Franzen

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

Franzen's 2001 book The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family romance, received a National Book Award, and he was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Freedom (2010) earned similar praise and culminated in an appearance on the front page of Time magazine with the headline "Great American Novelist."Franzen has been contributing to The New Yorker magazine since 1994.

The state of contemporary literature was criticized in Harper's essay Perchance to Dream in 1996.

Oprah Winfrey's book club pick in 2001 of The Corrections led to a tense rivalry with the talk show host.

Franzen has become known for his views on everything from social networking services such as Twitter to individual, as well as in the stillness and permanence of the printed word. "The true substance of our daily lives is utterly electronic distraction" to the omission of e-books ("All the true things, the authentic things, are dying off.") America's own destruction.

Early life and education

Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen. His father, who was born in Minnesota, was the son of an immigrant from Sweden; his mother's ancestry was Eastern European. Franzen grew up in a wealthy suburb on 83 Webster Woods Drive in Webster Groves, Missouri, where he earned a degree in German at Swarthmore College. He studied abroad in Germany during the 1979–80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich, as part of his undergraduate studies. He met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base Walter Berglund in Freedom. He stayed at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin from 1981 to 1982; he speaks fluent German. Franzen was born in 1982 and moved with his wife to Somerville, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a novelist. When writing his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, he worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring more than a dozen papers. Franzen sold The Twenty-Seventh City to Farrar Straus & Giroux in September 1987, a month after he and his wife moved to New York City.

Early novels

The Twenty-Seventh City, which was published in 1988 in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, is based on the city's demise from grace, with St. Louis being the city's "fourth city" in the 1870s. This sprawling book was warmly welcomed, establishing Franzen as a writer to watch. Franzen referred to The Twenty-Seventh City as "a chat with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns. "I was a skinny, terrified boy attempting to write a big book," he said in a later interview. The mask I wore was that of a rhetorically airtight, highly articulate middle-aged writer."

Strong Motion (1992) focuses more on a dysfunctional family, the Hollands, and uses seismic events on the American East Coast as a model for the quakes that occur in family life (as Franzen put it), "I imagined static lives being interrupted from without." "I imagined violent scenes that would take away the veneer and show people screaming out in a raged moral conflict at each other." "The principles of science and faith are fundamentally opposing models of making sense in the world," Franzen describes in a "systems novel." At the time of its publication, the book was not a financial success. In a 2010 Paris Review interview, Franzen defended the book, saying, "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."

Franzen taught a fiction-writing class at Swarthmore in 1992 and 1994:

Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to be a guest judge of the workshop assignments for the 1992 class.

Personal life

Franzen was married to fellow writer Valerie Cornell in the early twenties. They were born in New York City and were married for fourteen years. In some of his essays in the collection Farther Away, his marriage and divorce are discussed.

Franzen lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his "spouse-equivalent" writer Kathy Chetkovich.

Franzen is best known as a good birdwatcher, as he wrote in his essay "My Bird Problem" from the start. In March 2018, he appeared on CBS Morning to discuss his obsession with birds and birdwatching. Franzen served on the board of the American Bird Conservancy for nine years. In 2013, a feature-length documentary based on Franzen's "Emptying the Skies" was released.

Franzen is a long-time fan of the Mekons, who appeared in the 2014 film Revenge of the Mekons to discuss the group's importance to him.

Franzen's glasses were stolen from his face by a gatecrasher who jokingly threatened to ransom them for $100,000 before being arrested by police in Hyde Park in 2010.

Source

Awards and honors

• 1981 Fulbright Scholarship to Germany
• 1988 Whiting Award
• 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2000 Berlin Prize (American Academy in Berlin)
• 2001 National Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
• 2001 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for The Corrections
• 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner (Fiction) for The Corrections
• 2010 Salon Book Award (Fiction) for Freedom
• 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards, International Author of the Year, Freedom
• 2011 Heartland Prize for Freedom
• 2011 John Gardner Award (Fiction) for Freedom
• 2012 Carlos Fuentes Medal (Inaugural award)
• 2013 Welt-Literaturpreis
• 2015 Budapest Grand Prize
• 2015 Euronatur Award for outstanding commitment to nature conservation in Europe
• 2017 Frank Schirrmacher Preis
• 2022 Thomas Mann Prize