Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959 and grew up in a suburb of St. Louis. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1981, studied on a scholarship at the Free University of Berlin, and then worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University. He currently resides in New York City. He published his first novel in 1988 ("The Twenty-Seventh City") and his second in 1992 ("Strong Motion"), both receiving critical acclaim. His major breakthrough came with his third book, "The Corrections," in 2001. The novel topped bestseller lists of major newspapers and magazines and was voted by nearly everyone as the Best Book of the Year. It received numerous accolades and ultimately won the prestigious National Book Award. Jonathan Franzen is considered one of the greatest contemporary American novelists. "The Corrections" has already been translated into 26 languages and has achieved worldwide success.