Jennifer Egan

American · born 1962

Born on September 7, 1962, in Chicago, the daughter of a lawyer father and a mother who worked in art, she moved with her mother and stepfather to San Francisco at seven after her parents divorced. She graduated from Lowell High School and the Katherine Delmar Burke School, then read English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she briefly dated Steve Jobs, who installed an early Macintosh in her bedroom. A Thouron Award took her to St John's College, Cambridge, for a master's degree, and in 1987 she settled in New York, catering at the World Trade Center and waiting on tables while she learned to write. Her stories appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's; her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1994), drew on a backpacking summer in Europe at seventeen, following the trail of a sister's suicide. Look at Me (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), tracked thirteen interlocking characters through the music industry across four decades, with one chapter rendered as a seventy-six-page PowerPoint deck composed by a twelve-year-old. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New Yorker published her 2012 story Black Box one tweet at a time on the magazine's Twitter account. Manhattan Beach (2017), the historical novel of a young woman diving for the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Second World War, was a critical and commercial success. She served as president of PEN America from 2018 to 2020. She lives with her husband and two sons in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.