Jonathan Franzen is a key figure in contemporary American writing, renowned for his novels, essays, and journalism. His 2001 novel, The Corrections , was a massive international success and the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. The New York Times admires The Corrections for being “ruled only by its own self-generating aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we’re under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read.” (The book also gained a special kind of fame when Franzen distanced himself from its selection for Oprah’s Book Club.)

All of Franzen’s writing, which includes two earlier novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) as well as a collection of essays How to Be Alone (2002), exemplifies his commitment to the social and cultural relevance of literary work. Described by reviewers as an acute critic of American life, Franzen has been said to continue a tradition of writers that stretches from Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.

Franzen was born near Chicago in 1959 and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981, he attended the Freie Universität in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar. He has received a Whiting Writers Award (1988), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize (2000). He writes frequently for The New Yorker and lives in New York City.