Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen
Franzen at the 2011 Time 100 gala
Born	August 17, 1959 (1959-08-17) Western Springs, Illinois
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1988–present
Genres	Literary fiction
Literary movement	Hysterical realism
Influences Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald
www.jonathanfranzen.com

Jonathan Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections (2001), a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Freedom, was published in August 2010.

He is known for his 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaning the state of literature, and for various controversies including the 2001 selection of The Corrections for Oprah Winfrey's book club and his October 2010 declaration (in an interview for The Guardian) that "America is almost a rogue state." Franzen writes for The New Yorker magazine.

Early life and education

Franzen was born to an American mother and Swedish father in Western Springs, Illinois, raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in German in 1981. As part of his undergraduate education, he studied abroad in Germany during the 1979-80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich program. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981-82. From these experiences, he speaks fluent German. Upon graduation Franzen got married and moved with his wife to Boston to pursue a career as a novelist. When this plan fell through, they relocated to New York, in 1987, where Franzen managed to sell his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.

Fiction

Early novels

The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, is set in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, and deals with the city's fall from grace, St. Louis having been the "fourth city" in the 1870s. This sprawling novel was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for BOMB Magazine, Franzen described The Twenty-Seventh City as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns."

Strong Motion (1992) focuses on a dysfunctional family, the Hollands, and uses seismic events on the American East Coast as a metaphor for the quakes that occur in family life.

The Corrections

Franzen's The Corrections, a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States, winning both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel was also on the short list for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was named a finalist for the 2002 PEN /Faulkner Award. A finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it lost to Empire Falls by Richard Russo.

In September 2001, The Corrections was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club. Franzen initially participated in the selection, sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah and appearing in B-roll footage in his hometown of St. Louis (described in an essay in How To Be Alone titled "Meet Me In St. Louis"). In October 2001, however, The Oregonian printed an article in which Franzen expressed unease with the selection. In an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, he expressed his worry that the Oprah logo on the cover dissuaded men from reading the book:

So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry — I'm sorry that it's, uh — I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say "If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it." Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation.

Soon afterward, Franzen's invitation to appear on Oprah's show was rescinded. Winfrey announced, "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book."

These events gained Franzen and his novel widespread media attention. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen said "I'd also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."

Following the success of The Corrections and the publication of The Discomfort Zone and How to Be Alone, Franzen began work on his next novel. In the interim, he published two short stories in The New Yorker: "Breakup Stories", published November 8, 2004, concerned the disintegration of four relationships; and "Two's Company", published May 23, 2005, concerned a couple who write for TV, then split up.

In 2011, it was announced that Franzen would write a multi-part television adaptation of The Corrections in collaboration with The Squid and The Whale director Noah Baumbach for HBO.

Freedom

Franzen at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival.

On June 8, 2009, Franzen published an extract from Freedom, his novel in progress, in The New Yorker. The extract, titled "Good Neighbors", concerned the trials and tribulations of a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota. On May 31, 2010, a second extract — titled "Agreeable" — was published, also in The New Yorker.

On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre, reading a portion of his forthcoming novel. Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern about the event, said that the "…material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy". Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."

On September 9, 2010, Franzen appeared on Fresh Air to discuss Freedom in the wake of its release. Franzen has drawn what he describes as a "feminist critique" for the attention that male authors receive over female authors—a critique he supports. Franzen also discussed his friendship with David Foster Wallace and the impact of Wallace's suicide on his writing process.

Freedom was the subject of a highly unusual "recall" in the United Kingdom starting in early October 2010. An earlier draft of the manuscript, to which Franzen had made over 200 changes, had been published by mistake. The publisher, HarperCollins initiated an exchange program, but thousands of books had been distributed by that time.

While promoting the book Franzen became the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King did so in 2000. He discussed the implications of the Time coverage, and the reasoning behind the title of Freedom in an interview in Manchester, England, in October 2010.

On September 17, 2010, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be an Oprah book club selection, the first of the last season of the Oprah Winfrey Show. On December 6, 2010, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote Freedom where they discussed that book and the controversy over his reservations about her picking The Corrections and what that would entail.

Other works

Franzen at the 2010 National Book Critics Circle awards

In 1996, while still working on The Corrections, Franzen published a literary manifesto in Harper's Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. Referencing manifestos written by Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe, among others, Franzen grappled with the novelist's role in an advanced media culture which seemed to no longer need the novel. In the end, Franzen rejects the goal of writing a great social novel about issues and ideas, in favor of focusing on the internal lives of characters and their emotions. Given the huge success of The Corrections, this essay offers a prescient look into Franzen's goals as both a literary and commercially-minded author.

Since The Corrections Franzen has published How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of essays including "Perchance To Dream", and The Discomfort Zone (2006), a memoir. How To Be Alone is essentially an apologia for reading, articulating Franzen's uncomfortable relationship with the place of fiction in contemporary society. It also probes the influence of his childhood and adolescence on his creative life, which is then further explored in The Discomfort Zone.

In September 2007, Franzen's translation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening (German: Frühlings Erwachen) was published. In his introduction, Franzen describes the Broadway musical version as "insipid" and "overpraised." In an interview with New York magazine, Franzen stated that he had in fact made the translation for Swarthmore College's theater department for $50 in 1986 and that it had sat in a drawer for 20 years since. After the Broadway show stirred up so much interest, Franzen said he was inspired to publish it because "I knew it was a good translation, better than anything else out there."

Franzen published a social commentary on cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space, I Just Called To Say I Love You (2008), in the September/October, 2008 issue of "Technology Review", published by MIT.

Personal life

He married Valerie Cornell in 1982; they separated in 1994 and are now divorced. Franzen now lives part of the year on the Upper East Side of New York City and part in Boulder Creek, California.

In 2010, he attracted attention while on a visit to London when a literary event was stormed and his spectacles were whisked from his face, a ransom note for $100,000 deposited and a police chase initiated through the city.

“Rules for Writing”

In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers including Richard Ford, Zadie Smith and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers. Franzen's rules ran as follows:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction [the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop].
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Awards and other recognition

• 1988 Whiting Writers' Award
• 1996 Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists
• 2001 National Book Award for The Corrections
• 2001 New York Times Best Books of the Year
• 2001 Salon Book Award (Fiction)
• 2001 New York Times Best Books of the Year for The Corrections
• 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist (Fiction)
• 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner (Fiction) for The Corrections
• 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist
• 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (short list)

Television appearances

This television-related list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Franzen made an appearance on Charlie Rose in 1996 with fellow authors David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner to discuss the effects of electronic media on the role of fiction in society.
• Franzen guest starred alongside Michael Chabon, Tom Wolfe, and Gore Vidal in the Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa", which first aired 19 November 2006. In the episode, he is depicted fighting over literary influences with his real-life friend Chabon.
• Franzen appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on December 6, 2010, to discuss his latest novel Freedom, Oprah's Book Club selection at the time.

Bibliography

Novels

• 1988 The Twenty-Seventh City
• 1992 Strong Motion
• 2001 The Corrections
• 2010 Freedom

Non-fiction

• 2002 How to Be Alone (essays)
• 2006 The Discomfort Zone (memoir)

Translated works

• 2007 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

External links

Media related to Jonathan Franzen at Wikimedia Commons

• Publisher's web page on Jonathan Franzen's
• National Book Award acceptance speech
• Essay by Franzen's girlfriend, Kathryn Chetkovich, about living with a writer from Granta (subscription required)
• "I Just Called to Say I Love You", an essay by Franzen in Technology Review (September/October 2008) (free registration required)

Interviews

• Paris Review, interview with Stephen Burn, Winter, 2010, with Photos
• An interview with Donald Antrim, Bomb Magazine, Fall, 2001
• An interview with Laura Miller, Salon.com, September 7, 2001
• An interview with Dave Weich, Powells.com, October 4, 2001
• An Interview with Todd Leopold, CNN.com, October 18, 2001
• An interview with Bernadette Conrad, Die Zeit, August 4, 2005
• Answering Viewers' Questions, Big Think, April 14, 2008
• Jonathan Franzen Recommends 4 Overlooked Books, The Daily Beast, August 30, 2010
• An interview with Gregg LaGambina, The A.V. Club, September 1, 2010
• An interview with Dave Haslam, October 3, 2010
• An Interview with J P O'Malley in The New Statesman Magazine, October 18, 2010
• Jonathan Franzen talks to Sarfraz Manzoor about his new novel Freedom The Guardian 25 October 2010
• 2001 BOMB Magazine interview of Jonathan Franzen by Donald Antrim