Franzen, Jonathan

Jonathan Franzen, (born August 17, 1959, Western Springs, Illinois, U.S.), American novelist and essayist whose sprawling multilayered novels about contemporary America elicited critical acclaim.

Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and later attended Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. After earning a B.A. in 1981, he attended Berlin’s Freie Universität as a Fulbright fellow. Upon his return to the United States he began his first novel, writing for eight hours each day. To earn money he worked weekends as a research assistant at Harvard University tracking earthquake activity around the world.

Franzen based his debut novel, The Twenty-seventh City (1988), in a fictional St. Louis. It envisions a dystopic city, primarily populated by Asian immigrants, where police use violence to intimidate political opponents of the power-hungry police chief. Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion (1992), draws on the author’s experience working in the field of seismology. Set in Boston, it tells of a Harvard seismologist who discovers a link between unexplained earthquakes and the disposal of chemical waste.

Franzen worked for eight years on his next novel, The Corrections (2001), which focuses on a family of five whose members endure unsuccessful marriages, strained familial relationships, and failed careers. The novel received extensive critical praise, winning a National Book Award in 2001. That same year the novel was at the centre of a dispute between American television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who selected it for her widely popular book club, and Franzen, who dismissed her previous selections as unsophisticated.

Following the deaths of his parents and the dissolution of his marriage, Franzen contributed a series of essays to The New Yorker magazine that were later compiled into his fourth book, How to Be Alone (2002). The volume’s 13 essays cover topics as varied as dealing with his father’s Alzheimer disease and his thoughts on conformity and privacy. Franzen published a memoir, The Discomfort Zone, in 2006 and a translation of German dramatist Frank Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening in 2007.

Franzen returned to fiction with the novel Freedom (2010), which takes a contemporary family of the American Midwest as its focus and probes its members’ relationships with each other and with those around them. The novel’s realist style and the psychological depth of its characters echoes The Corrections. The Kraus Project (2013) collected English translations of several commentaries and a poem by Austrian critic Karl Kraus, with annotations from Franzen and two other scholars. Franzen’s preoccupation with family dynamics was again evident in his next novel, Purity (2015), which centres on a young woman whose mother refuses to reveal her origins. She eventually joins an organization resembling Wikileaks and becomes involved with its haunted leader. Franzen used her travails, and those of a predictably sprawling cast of supporting characters, to muster a biting critique of consumerism, digital culture, and human solipsism. The End of the End of the Earth (2018) is an essay collection.

Franzen returned to fiction with Crossroads (2021), which follows a family in 1970s suburban Chicago. The novel was the first in the projected A Key to All Mythologies series.