Jonathan Franzen author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, sous licence CC BY 3.0.

Jonathan Franzen

Né(e): August 17, 1959 – Western Springs, Illinois, United States

Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist whose work examines family dynamics, moral conflict, environmental concern, and contemporary American society. He is best known for The Corrections, which won the 2001 National Book Award, as well as Freedom and Purity, novels that helped establish him as a major literary voice.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Jonathan Franzen was born on August 17, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb that would leave a lasting mark on his sense of Midwestern family life. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1981 with high honors in German and a minor in English, then studied at Berlin’s Freie Universität as a Fulbright fellow. Back in the United States, he committed himself to fiction with an almost monastic routine, writing daily while supporting himself in part through research work tied to seismology, an experience that later fed directly into his second novel, Strong Motion. ((https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Franzen?utm_source=openai))

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Citations

quote
The writer’s life is a life of revisions, and I came to think that what needed revision were my own earlier books
-The Art of Fiction No. 207
quote
Failure, failure, failure is mostly what happens. But the failures start adding up to possibilities if you wait long enough
-The Rumpus One-Off Book Club Interviews Jonathan Franzen
quote
I miss the failure
-Jonathan Franzen talks with David Remnick
quote
The only honest way to do that is by leaving stuff out, not by making stuff up
-Jonathan Franzen on Memory and Memoir
quote
Every time I try to start a novel I feel like I’ve never written one before
-Modern life has become extremely distracting
quote
Distraction pours through every portal, especially through the internet
-Modern life has become extremely distracting
quote
I take a certain amount of pride in not being a professional novelist, in apparently being a lifelong amateur
-I must be near the end of my career – people are starting to approve
quote
Why do birds matter to me? Oh, because I love them
-Jonathan Franzen Talks Birds

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Voix de la Communauté

"Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist"

TIME

"Jonathan Franzen has a real gift for getting people into a tizzy"

The New Yorker

"Purity Tyler — heroine of the latest novel confirming that Jonathan Franzen is among this country’s best living writers — goes by the nickname Pip"

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Reading Jonathan Franzen on form is like watching a baseball star toss a ball"

The Guardian

"Jonathan Franzen has always been one for capturing the zeitgeist"

The Independent

"Nobody much expects a Great American Novel to materialise – Jonathan Franzen has gone and written two"

The Independent

"Jonathan Franzen’s ‘melancholy realism’ takes the failure of our idealism as its primary subject"

The Guardian

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