Michael Chabon

American · born 1963

Born in Washington, D.C. on 24 May 1963, Michael Chabon was raised in an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the son of Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, also a lawyer. He grew up between Pittsburgh and Columbia, Maryland, after his parents divorced when he was eleven, and decided at ten, when his first school story earned an A, that he would be a writer. He studied under Chuck Kinder at the University of Pittsburgh, then took an MFA at the University of California, Irvine, where his thesis advisor secretly sent the manuscript that became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to a literary agent. It sold in 1988 for a $155,000 advance, making him a literary celebrity at twenty-four. A second novel, Fountain City, ballooned to 1,500 pages before he abandoned it; in seven months of writing he replaced it with Wonder Boys (1995), drawing on the experience itself. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a sixteen-year saga of two Jewish cousins creating comic books in the early 1940s, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), set in an alternate Alaska where European Jews settled after Israel's 1948 collapse, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise awards. He has written screenplays, comics, children's books, and an essay collection, Maps and Legends, in defence of plot-driven fiction and what he calls the merits of genre. Telegraph Avenue (2012), billed as a twenty-first century Middlemarch, and Moonglow (2016), a fictionalised account of his maternal grandfather's deathbed confessions, followed. He lives in Berkeley, California, with the novelist Ayelet Waldman and their four children.