Jonathan Franzen

When The Corrections was published, in the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen was better known for his nonfiction than for the two novels he had already published. In an essay he wrote for Harper's in 1996, Franzen lamented the declining cultural authority of the American novel and described his personal search for reasons to persist as a fiction writer. “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read,” he wrote. “Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

Five years after publishing the Harper’s essay, Franzen became fully engaged. The Corrections was an international bestseller, with translations in 40 languages, American hardcover sales of nearly one million copies, nominations for nearly every major book prize in the country, and winner of the National Book Award for fiction. With time, The Corrections has approached canonical status. In 2024, it was the #2 novel on the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. And in 2026 it was adapted by Franzen as a limited series on Netflix starring Meryl Streep and directed by Cord Anderson.

When Franzen’s next novel, Freedom, was published, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, the review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, declared Freedom “a masterpiece of American fiction.” After the book had debuted at #1 on the Times bestseller list, Oprah announced it as her 64th Book Club pick, and she and Franzen made up with each other on air in December 2010. Freedom won the John Gardner Prize and the Heartland Prize for fiction and was chosen as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010. It was also a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His fourth novel, Purity, likewise became an immediate international bestseller.

Franzen’s current project is A Key to All Mythologies, a trilogy that traces the inner life of American culture from the 1960s through the present day. The first volume, Crossroads, was a national bestseller and was named Best Book of the Year by Barack Obama, Amazon, BookPage, Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah Daily, The Millions, New Statesman, Newsweek, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Slate, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Telegraph, TIME, USA Today, Vogue, Vulture, and The Washington Post.  Crossroads is currently in development at Netflix as a limited series.

In addition to his six novels, Franzen is the author of four works of nonfiction, including the bestselling  How to Be Alone, the memoir The Discomfort Zone, and, most recently, The End of the End of the Earth. His work as a translator from the German includes the play Spring Awakening, by Frank Wedekind; The Kraus Project, in which a second memoir is hidden in the annotations to his translations of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus; and Thomas Brussig's comic novel The Short End of the Sonnenallee (Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee). His short stories and essays, including political journalism, have most recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and National Geographic. Franzen was executive producer of a feature documentary, Emptying the Skies, about the struggle to save songbirds from illegal hunting in Europe; the film is based on his New Yorker essay of the same name. His essay "What If We Stopped Pretending?" touched off a firestorm of controversy with its assertion that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable; the essay has received well over a million visits on newyorker.com.

Born in LaGrange, Illinois, in 1959, Jonathan Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri. After graduating from Swarthmore College, in 1981, he studied in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard. In addition to prizes for his books, Franzen has received the Carlos Fuentes Medal, the Thomas Mann Prize, the EuroNatur Prize, and the Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.