Jonathan Franzen

American · born 1959

Born Jonathan Earl Franzen on August 17, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of a civil engineer of Swedish descent and a mother of Eastern European stock, he grew up in the comfortable St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves, in a household where ambition and quiet competition ran beneath every dinner. He read German at Swarthmore College, graduating with high honors in 1981, and spent his junior year abroad through Wayne State's Munich program before holding a Fulbright at the Freie Universität Berlin. He married the writer Valerie Cornell in 1982 and moved with her to Somerville, Massachusetts, to write a first novel while assisting in Harvard's earth-sciences department, where he coauthored several dozen papers in seismology. The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) were respectfully received but sold modestly. In 1996 he published "Perchance to Dream" in Harper's, a long essay on the social novel's diminished place in American life, an essay that effectively announced what he intended to do next. The Corrections (2001) won the National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and sold strongly, but its selection for Oprah's Book Club produced a public falling-out when Franzen voiced misgivings about the sticker on the cover. Freedom (2010) put him on the cover of Time as "Great American Novelist," the first writer so honored in a decade. Purity (2015) and Crossroads (2021) extended the project, the latter conceived as the first volume of a planned trilogy. He divides his life between New York and Santa Cruz, California, where he writes in a small studio and spends long days bird-watching with a pair of Swarovski binoculars on the coastal trails.