Dzhonatan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is an American writer.

He was born on August 17, 1959, in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in Missouri, in the suburb of Webster Groves in St. Louis, and studied at Swarthmore College. In addition, during his student years he received a Fulbright Foundation scholarship, which allows outstanding students to study abroad, and spent some time at universities in West Germany.

He now lives in New York, on the East Side, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

In 1988, the writer’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published. The book is about St. Louis, which in the 1870s had once been the country’s fourth-largest city but was gradually losing its leading position. The rather large novel was well received, and after it Franzen came to be seen, at the very least, as a young and highly promising author.

In 1992, Strong Motion was published, centered on the “dysfunctional” Holland family and earthquakes on the U.S. East Coast—a metaphorical description of the disasters that shake family life.

Also widely known is The Corrections, a socially critical novel that received excellent reviews in America, the national literary award National Book Award in the fiction category (in 2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same category (in 2002).

In September 2001, the book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Jonathan Franzen responded enthusiastically and gave Oprah a long interview... However, by October his attitude toward the event had changed dramatically: books were now being printed with the “Oprah Show” logo, and Franzen naturally saw in his novel his own book, his own creation, and did not want anyone’s corporate emblems displayed on its cover. He declined the next invitation to be interviewed by Oprah, not even bothering to come up with a valid and polite excuse.

However, neither event had any effect on sales: The Corrections remained one of the best-selling books of the twenty-first century. Later, in one of his