Jonathan Franzen is a renowned American author, well-known for his literary fiction and non-fiction books. He was born on August 17, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri called Webster Groves. Franzen was the last born in a family of three children, with a father who was an engineer and a mother who was a housewife. His mother did not value the arts and encouraged him to focus on other subjects, but Franzen's passion for writing persisted.
After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981 with a degree in German, Franzen spent a year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar. He later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. It was in Boston that Franzen's career as an author began in earnest. He married his wife, Valerie Cornell, in 1982, and the couple moved to Boston, where Franzen pursued his writing career.
Franzen's work has received significant critical acclaim. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, and his second novel, Strong Motion, followed in 1992. However, it was his third novel, The Corrections, that brought Franzen widespread recognition. The novel, published in 2001, won the National Book Award for fiction. In addition to his novels, Franzen has also published several works of non-fiction, including How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone.
Franzen's work has earned him numerous accolades, including a Whiting Writers' Award in 1988, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists in 1996, the Salon Book Award in 2001, the New York Times Best Books of the Year in 2001, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002. His writing has also been recognized by his peers, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.