Justin Cronin author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, sous licence CC BY 4.0.

Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin is an American novelist whose work blends literary fiction, suspense, and speculative dystopian themes. He is best known for The Passage trilogy—The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors—and the novel The Ferryman. His fiction has reached bestseller lists and earned broad international readership.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Justin Cronin emerged from a firmly literary background before becoming one of the more unusual crossover successes in contemporary American fiction. Raised in New England, he studied at Harvard and later at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, experiences that helped move writing from a distant ambition to the center of his life. Early in his career, he balanced fiction with teaching and freelance work, spending more than a decade at La Salle University before joining Rice University. His first major breakthrough came with Mary and O’Neil, a novel in stories that won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize. The Summer Guest followed, confirming him as a novelist of emotional precision, family tension, and closely observed interior life.

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Citations

quote
I often say I became a writer because I forgot to go to law school
-Interview with Justin Cronin, PEN/Hemingway Award Winner
quote
For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse
-Salon Reading Club
quote
My goal is just to write the best books I can
-An Extended Conversation with Houston Novelist Justin Cronin
quote
You have to sit down and finish
-An Extended Conversation with Houston Novelist Justin Cronin
quote
Human lives generally feel like poorly written novels
-Esquire interview on The Ferryman
quote
Every individual life is its own apocalypse. No one gets out alive
-The World Behind the World
quote
We never used the word plot in a workshop once
-The World Behind the World
quote
I think I began writing it before we’d gotten to the end of the driveway
-The Summer Guest sales conference remarks

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Voix de la Communauté

"Justin Cronin must have been a novelist in an earlier life"

The Boston Globe

"Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy is remarkable for the unremitting drive of its narrative"

Stephen King

"Justin Cronin's Mary and O'Neil is that rare thing: a wholly engrossing story of the ordinary life"

Madison Smartt Bell

"Justin Cronin has written a wild, headlong, sweeping extravaganza of a novel"

Jennifer Egan

"Justin Cronin has written a great American novel"

The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Justin Cronin's writing is crisp, thrilling and, where appropriate, vastly emotional"

The Dallas Morning News

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