Jonathan Franzen

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday [8/17] of Jonathan Franzen, born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He grew up in St. Louis.

He graduated from Swarthmore, spent a year in Berlin on a Fulbright, and worked at Harvard in the seismology lab, studying earthquakes. When he was 22 years old, he started writing his first novel, and six years later it was published as The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). It got a lot of good reviews, but it didn't make much of a splash in more mainstream culture, and Franzen was disappointed. The same thing happened with his second novel, Strong Motion (1992). So he wrote an essay for Harper's called "Perchance to Dream" and complained that America no longer had any place for a "big, social novel" that was both literary and relevant. He said that America had become obsessed with money, technology, and celebrity.

Then he went ahead and wrote a big, social novel that the critics loved but was also a best-seller: The Corrections (2001). He wrote it over a period in which his marriage broke up, his father succumbed to Alzheimer's disease and died, and his mother got cancer and died as well. He said, "The most important experience of my life, really, to date, is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had."

Since then, Franzen has published a book of essays called How to Be Alone (2002) and a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006). His first novel since The Corrections is coming out in a couple of weeks. It's called Freedom, and it's the story of Patty and Walter Berglund, a progressive couple from St. Paul who find themselves middle-aged and no longer in control of their lives that once seemed so perfect. Walter is working for the coal industry, their teenage son has moved out to live with Republicans, and Patty is torn between her husband and his best friend from college.

Jonathan Franzen said, "I come from a kind of old-fashioned Midwest, and I live in a technocorporate, postironic, cool, late-late-late Eastern world. The two worlds hardly ever talk to each other, but they're completely, constantly talking to one another inside me. [...] I have my parents talking to me in my head and then other parts of myself talking back. I think this is potentially an interesting conversation."