Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.[5]
Early life and education
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois,[6] the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen.[7][8] His father, raised in Minnesota, was the son of an immigrant from Sweden; his mother's ancestry was Eastern European. Franzen grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College, receiving a degree in German in 1981.[9] 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. While there, he met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base the character Walter Berglund in Freedom.[10] He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981–82;[11] he speaks fluent German. Franzen was married in 1982 and moved with his wife to Somerville, Massachusetts to pursue a career as a novelist. While writing his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, he worked as a research assistant at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring several dozen papers.[12] In September 1987, a month after he and his wife moved to New York City, Franzen sold The Twenty-Seventh City to Farrar Straus & Giroux.[13]
Career
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.[14] 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",[15] adding in a later interview "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."[16]
Strong Motion (1992) focuses mainly 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 (as Franzen put it, "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other."[16]). A 'systems novel', the key 'systems' of Strong Motion according to Franzen are "... the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world."[16] The novel was not a financial success at the time of its publication. Franzen subsequently defended the novel in his 2010 Paris Review interview, remarking "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."[16]
Franzen taught a fiction-writing seminar at Swarthmore in the spring of 1992 and 1994:
On that first day of class, Franzen wrote two words on the blackboard: "truth" and "beauty," and told his students that these were the goals of fiction. Haslett describes Franzen's classroom manner as "serious." "He meant what he said and didn't suffer fools gladly." But this seriousness was leavened by a "great relish for words and writing," adds Kathleen Lawton-Trask '96, a 1994 workshop student who is now a writer and high school English teacher. "People who teach fiction workshops aren't always starry-eyed about writing, but he was. He read our stories so closely that he often started class with a rundown of words that were not used quite correctly in stories from that week's workshop. (I still remember him explaining to us the difference between cement and concrete.) At the same time, he was eminently supportive and sympathetic; I don't remember those corrections ever feeling condescending."[17]
For the 1992 class, Franzen invited David Foster Wallace to be a guest judge of the workshop pieces.
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:
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.[22]
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."[23]
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."[24]
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.[25]
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.[26][27] HBO has since passed on Corrections, citing "difficulty" in "adapting the book's challenging narrative, which moves through time and cuts forwards and back": that would be "difficult to sustain in a series and challenging for viewers to follow, hampering the potential show's accessibility."[28]
In September 2019, The Corrections was voted sixteenth in a list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century so far by writers and critics of the Guardian newspaper.[29]
On June 8, 2009, Franzen published an excerpt from Freedom, his novel in progress, in The New Yorker. The excerpt, titled "Good Neighbors", concerned the trials and tribulations of a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota. On May 31, 2010, a second excerpt — titled "Agreeable" — was published, also in The New Yorker.[30]
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.[31][32] 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."[32]
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.[33]
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.[34]
While promoting the book, Franzen became the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. Franzen appeared alongside the headline "Great American Novelist".[4] 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.[35]
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.[36] 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.[37]
Franzen has stated the writing of Freedom was influenced by the death of his close friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace.[38]
In an interview with Portland Monthly on December 18, 2012, Franzen revealed that he currently had "a four-page, single-spaced proposal" for a fifth novel he was currently working on,[39] although he went on to suggest that while he had a proposal there was no guarantee that what was proposed would make the final cut, saying of similar proposals for previous novels, "I look at the old proposals now, and I see the one part of them that actually got made into a book, and I think, 'How come I couldn't see that? What is all this other stuff?'".[39] Franzen also hinted that the new novel would probably also be long, adding "I've let go of any illusion that I'm a writer of 150-page novels. I need room to let things turn around over time and see them from the whole lives of other characters, not just the single character. For better or worse, one point of view never seems to do it for me."[39] In October 2014, during a discussion at Colgate University, Franzen read a "self-contained first-person narrative" that is part of a novel that he hoped will be out in the summer of 2015.[40]
On November 17, 2014, The New York Times Artsbeat Blog reported that the novel, titled Purity, would be out in September.[41] Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described Purity as a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The story centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who doesn't know who her father is and sets out to uncover his identity. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and hinges on the mystery of Pip's family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower.[41]
In 2016, Daily Variety reported that the novel was in the process of being adapted into a 20-hour limited series for Showtime by Todd Field who would share writing duties with Franzen and the playwright Sir David Hare. It would star Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and be executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare & Scott Rudin.[42]
However, in a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare said that, given the budget for Field's adaptation (170 million), he doubted it would ever be made, but added "It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They're extremely interesting people."[43]
Purity was a relative commercial disappointment compared to Franzen's two previous novels, selling only 255,476 copies, compared to 1.15 million copies of Freedom and 1.6 million copies of The Corrections.[44]
A Key to All Mythologies
On November 13, 2020, Franzen's publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced the publication of Franzen's new novel, Crossroads, the first volume in a trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies.[45][46][47]
The novel received mostly favorable reviews, with a cumulative "Positive" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 48 book reviews from mainstream literary critics.[49]Bookforum called it Franzen's "finest novel yet," his "greatest and most perfect novel,"[50] and Dwight Garner of the New York Times said it was "warmer than anything he's yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect."[51] According to the Times Literary Supplement:
Crossroads is largely free from the vices to which Franzen's previous work has been addicted: the self-conscious topicality; the show-off sophistication; the formal heavy-handedness. It retains many of his familiar virtues: the robust characterization; the escalating comedy; the virtuosic command of narrative rhythm.[52]
Critics especially praised the character of Marion, whom Garner called "one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction."[51][53][54][55][56][57]
The novel is about a pastor, his wife, and four children. It's split into two sections called 'Advent' and 'Easter.' Writing for The Nation, Rumaan Alam says "in Crossroads, every plotline leads to God."[58]
Other works
Franzen in 2010
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.[59]
In 2002, Franzen published a critique of the novels of William Gaddis, entitled "Mr. Difficult", in The New Yorker. He begins by recounting how some readers felt The Corrections was spoiled by being too high-brow in parts, and summarizes his own views of reading difficult fiction. He proposes a "Status model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Art, and also a "Contract model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Entertainment, and finds that he subscribes to both models. He praises The Recognitions, admits that he only got halfway through J R, and explains why he does not like the rest of Gaddis's novels.[60]
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."[62]
Franzen published a social commentary on cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space, "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (2008),[63] in the September/October 2008 issue of MIT Technology Review.
In 2012 he published Farther Away, a collection of essays dealing with such topics as his love of birds, his friendship with David Foster Wallace, and his thoughts on technology.[64]
In 2013, Franzen published The Kraus Project. It consists of three major essays by the "Perennially ... impossible to translate"[65] Austrian "playwright, poet, social commentator and satirical genius"[65]Karl Kraus – ""Heine and the Consequences" a takedown of the beloved German poet, "Nestroy and Posterity" which established that playwright's reputation in Austria to this day, and "Afterword to Heine and the Consequences"".[65] The essays are accompanied by "Franzen's [own] plentiful, trenchant yet off-beat annotations"[65] taking on "... Kraus' mantle-commenting on what Kraus would say (and what Franzen's opinion is) about Macs and PCs; decrying Twitter's claim of credit for the Arab Spring; and unfurling how media conglomerates influence politics in their quest for profits."[65]
Franzen published his third essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, in November 2018.[66] According to advance press for the book, the collection "gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, [and] Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes—both human and literary—that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary."[66]
In September 2019, Franzen published an essay on climate change in The New Yorker entitled "What If We Stopped Pretending?",[67] which generated controversy among scientists and online pundits because of its alleged pessimism.[68][69] The term doomerism became popular amid the response to the piece.[70] A Sierra Club interview with Franzen, from January 2019 further explores Franzen's feelings about climate change and action.[71][example needed]
In an interview with Transatlantica conducted in March 2018, Franzen mentioned that he had just started work on a new novel, having recently sold it to publishers on the basis of a three-page proposal.[72] Later that year, in a profile piece for The New York Times Magazine in June 2018, Franzen confirmed that he was currently at work on the early stages of his sixth novel, which he speculated could be his last. "So, I may be wrong ... But somehow this new one really does feel like my last.".[44] Subsequently, in an interview reproduced on The Millions website in April 2020, Franzen mentioned that he was "almost done" with writing this sixth novel.[73]Crossroads: A Novel was published on October 5, 2021.
During a lecture on autobiography and fiction, Franzen discussed four perennial questions often asked of him by audiences, all of which annoy or bother him in some way. They are:
Who are your influences?
What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?
I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters "take over" and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?
Is your fiction autobiographical?
In the lecture he said of the third question in particular "This one always raises my blood pressure" and quoted Nabokov in response.
In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers such as Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers.[74]
Personal life
In his early twenties, Franzen was married to fellow writer Valerie Cornell.[75] They lived in New York City and were married for fourteen years. His marriage and divorce are mentioned in some of his essays in the collection Farther Away.
As first reported in his essay "My Bird Problem,"[78] Franzen is well known as a serious birdwatcher.[79] He appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in March 2018 to discuss his love of birds and birdwatching.[80][81] Franzen served for nine years on the board of the American Bird Conservancy.[82] A feature-length documentary based on Franzen's essay "Emptying the Skies" was released in 2013.[83][84]
Franzen is a longtime fan of the punk-rock collective The Mekons; he appeared in the 2014 documentary Revenge of the Mekons to discuss the group's importance to him.[85]
In 2010, at an event at the Serpentine Pavilion in London celebrating the launch of Freedom, Franzen's glasses were stolen from his face by a gate-crasher, who jokingly attempted to ransom them for $100,000 before being apprehended by police elsewhere in Hyde Park.[86][87][88]
In January 2011, The Observer named him as one of "20 activists, filmmakers, writers, politicians and celebrities who will be setting the global environmental agenda in the coming year".[104]
The first international academic symposium solely dedicated to Franzen's work took place at Glasgow University, UK, March 22, 2013.[107] Another one, "Jonathan Franzen: Identity and Crisis of the American Novel", was scheduled to take place at the University of Córdoba, Spain, April 18–19, 2013.[108]
In 2001, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose, on November 21, 2001[110] to discuss The Corrections; and again on December 27[111] after winning the National Book Award for The Corrections.
In 2002, Franzen appeared on Charlie Rose (October 30, 2002[112]) to discuss his essay collection How to Be Alone.
In 2010, Franzen appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in support of her selection of Freedom for Oprah's Book Club. Several viewers noted the brevity of Franzen's appearance on the show,[114][115] although a thirty-minute "After the Show" Q&A was later made available online.[116]
In 2016, Franzen appeared on Jeopardy! as part of the show's Power Players Week, where journalists and intellectuals compete on the show with winnings donated to the player's charity of choice—Franzen played for the American Bird Conservancy.[119] Franzen also appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers.[120]
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
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How to Be Alone is a 2002 book collecting fourteen essays by American writer Jonathan Franzen.
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The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.
Rodrigo Corral is a graphic designer and conceptual artist based in New York City. In 2002, Corral founded Rodrigo Corral Design studio to create iconic book jacket art for the publishing industry. Corral has created designs and conceptual art for Jay-Z, Ray Dalio, John Green, Chuck Palahniuk, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Libeskind, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz, Gucci Mane, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Jared Leto, Jeff VanderMeer, Edward Snowden, Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow and for organizations such as The Criterion Collection, New York magazine, and The New York Times.
"Why Bother?", originally published as "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels", is a literary essay by American novelist Jonathan Franzen. It is often referred to as "The Harper's Essay". First published in the April 1996 issue of Harper's magazine, the essay concerns the persistence of reading within the context of technological growth and distraction. Franzen recounts his meditations on the state and possibility of the novel form, often against the backdrop of his personal experience, eventually concluding that the novel still has potential cultural agency in the United States, and often gains it by paradoxical drives of both culture and author.
↑ Brodesser-Akner, Taffy (June 26, 2018). "Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018. Retrieved June 26, 2018. During a series of interviews, Franzen expressed ambivalence about Oprah's endorsement — that it might alienate male readers, who he very much was hoping would read his book; that the "logo of corporate ownership" made him uneasy; that he had found a few of her choices in the past "schmaltzy" and "one-dimensional." Oprah disinvited him from her show in response, and Franzen was rebuked on all sides for his ingratitude and his luck and his privilege. He quickly became as famous for dissing Oprah as he was for writing a great book.
↑ Laura Shapiro, "Terra Not So Firma," Newsweek, January 20, 1992.Archived July 25, 2012, at the Wayback Machine (Shapiro: "A huge and masterly drama of St. Louis under siege, gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing." Shapiro also noted The Twenty-Seventh City's "brilliance," and the author's "prodigious gifts," concluding, "The news that he is at work on a third [novel] is welcome indeed."]
↑ Gross, Terry (October 15, 2001). "Novelist Jonathan Franzen". Fresh Air. NPR. Archived from the original on August 17, 2018. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
↑ Kachka, Boris (August 5, 2013). "Corrections". Slate. ISSN1091-2339. Archived from the original on August 17, 2018. Retrieved August 17, 2018.
↑ Lopate, Phillip (May 18, 2012). "Manageable Discontents". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 29, 2015. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
↑ Alejandro Alvarado (November 25, 2012). "Dan medalla Carlos Fuentes a Franzen"[Carlos Fuentes medal given to Franzen]. Reforma.com (in Spanish). Grupo Reforma. Archived from the original on March 5, 2023. Retrieved November 25, 2012.
↑ Barrie-Anthony, Steven (November 30, 2005). "The call of 'D'oh!'". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. Retrieved September 10, 2010. The script calls for Chabon and Franzen to brawl during a dispute about their literary influences, and standing next to each other in the recording room, the friends ready themselves for a fight. Franzen complains loudly that he has fewer lines than Chabon – "Only 38 words!" – to which Chabon responds, "I see there's a little counting going on in the Franzenian corner."
Burn, Stephen J. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London/New York 2011.
Freitag, Sibylle. The Return of the Real in the Works of Jonathan Franzen. Essen (Germany) 2009.
Miceli, Barbara. "A cancer on the planet": Mountaintop Removal and Environmental Crime in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom" in Forum Filologiczne Ateneum 1(7) 2019, pp.343–356.
Weinstein, Philip. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. Bloomsbury, 2015.
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