 First edition cover | |
| Author | Michael Chabon |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Villard Books |
Publication date | March 14, 1995 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, paperback) |
| Pages | 368 pp [1] (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | 0-679-41588-2 (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 30895804 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3553.H15 W66 1995 |
Wonder Boys is a 1995 novel by the American writer Michael Chabon. [1] [2] [3] It was adapted into a film with the same title in 2000.
Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611-page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land Downstairs, which was published seven years earlier. On the eve of a college-sponsored writers' and publishers' weekend called WordFest, Tripp's wife walks out on him, and he learns that his mistress, the chancellor of the college, Sara Gaskell, is pregnant with his child. To top it all off, Tripp finds himself involved in a bizarre crime committed by one of his students, an alienated young writer named James Leer. During a party, Leer shoots and kills the chancellor’s dog and steals her husband’s prized Marilyn Monroe collectible: the jacket worn by the actress on the day of her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.
The New York Times reviewed the novel as "...the ultimate writing-program novel. If that sounds insulting, I don't mean it to be. But anyone who has ever served time in a writing program and gone to the "writing festivals" at various universities will instantly recognize the milieu and the characters." [4]
The novel grew from Chabon’s concerns with completing an unrealized novel, Fountain City, about the construction of a perfect baseball park in Florida. He decided to write a story about, in part, an author who couldn’t finish his own work. The main character of Grady Tripp is admittedly based on University of Pittsburgh professor, Chuck Kinder, who taught the undergraduate Chabon in the early 1980s. Kinder’s great opus, a novel inspired by his friendship with author Raymond Carver, was reportedly more than 3000 pages long at one point. It was finally published in a very slimmed-down version in 2001 as Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale.
Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, DC, he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is a British novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Czech artist Joe Kavalier and Brooklyn-born writer Sammy Clay, before, during, and after World War II. In the novel, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry from its nascency into its Golden Age. Kavalier & Clay was published to "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller, receiving nominations for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation," and in 2007, The New York Review of Books called the novel Chabon's magnum opus.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 1988 novel by American author Michael Chabon. It is a coming-of-age tale set during the early 1980s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Stephen Chbosky is an American screenwriter, film producer, film director, novelist, television writer, and television producer. He is best-known for writing the bestselling coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), as well as for writing and directing the 2012 film adaptation of the book. Most recently, he directed the 2017 drama Wonder and the 2021 film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. His first psychological horror novel, Imaginary Friend, was published in October 2019.
Stephen Keith Kloves is an American filmmaker. He wrote and directed the 1989 film The Fabulous Baker Boys and is mainly known for his adaptations of novels, especially for all but one of the Harry Potter films and for Wonder Boys, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels, accompanying short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003.
Amanda Davis was an American writer and teacher who died in a plane accident.
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection is a 2004 novella by Michael Chabon. It is a detective story that in many ways pays homage to the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other writers of the genre. The story, set in 1944, revolves around an unnamed 89-year-old long-retired detective, now interested mostly in beekeeping, and his quest to find a missing parrot, the only friend of a mute Jewish boy. The title of the novella references Doyle's 1893 Sherlock Holmes story "The Final Problem" and the Final Solution, as well as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1974 novel written in homage to Conan Doyle by Nicholas Meyer.
The Pitt News is an independent, student-written and student-managed newspaper for the main campus of the University of Pittsburgh in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The Pitt News has been active in some form since 1910 and is published Monday through Friday during the regular academic year and Wednesdays during the summer.
The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is a constituent college of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, United States. Established in 1915, Grady College offers undergraduate degrees in journalism, advertising, public relations, and entertainment and media studies, along with master's and doctoral programs of study. Grady has consistently been ranked among the top schools of journalism education and research in the U.S. It is home to several prominent centers, awards, and institutes, including the Peabody Awards, recognized as one of the most prestigious awards in electronic journalism, the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage, the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, the New Media Institute, and National Press Photographers Association.
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her seven novels.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 2008 comedy-drama film based on Michael Chabon's 1988 novel of the same name. The film was written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. It was produced by Michael London and executive produced by Omar Amanat. Shooting in Pittsburgh ended in October 2006, with the film set for release in 2008. It made its world premiere in January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival. Set in 1980s Pittsburgh, the film follows the affairs of two young men with one woman, and later also with each other.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, and that the fledgling State of Israel was destroyed in 1948. The novel is set in Sitka, which it depicts as a large, Yiddish-speaking metropolis.
Wonder Boys is a 2000 comedy-drama film directed by Curtis Hanson and written by Steve Kloves. An international co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, it is based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Michael Chabon. Michael Douglas stars as professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing at a university but has been unable to finish his second novel.
Charles Alfonso Kinder II was an American novelist.
Moonglow is a 2016 novel by Michael Chabon. The book chronicles the life of Chabon's grandfather, a WW2 soldier, engineer and rocket enthusiast who marries a troubled Jewish survivor from France and lives a challenging, wandering life in postwar America. Chabon tells the story using a mixture of strict memoir and creative fiction writing. The narrator functions as a proxy for the author, Chabon.
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