Who

Franzen is known for his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections, and his public spat with Oprah after she picked it for her book club.

Backstory

Franzen considers himself more ambitious than any other novelist he knows, which is saying something considering he's good friends with David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon. It took a while for his ambition to show results, though: A year after college, in 1982, Franzen married fellow aspiring author Valerie Cornell, and the two of them holed up in a small apartment in the Boston suburb of Somerville, determined to create publication-worthy prose. But while his first two books, 1988's The Twenty-Seventh City and 1992's Strong Motion, received moderate critical acclaim, they did zilch in the way of sales; as his books collected dust in Barnes & Noble, he supported himself by working as a creative writing instructor at his alma mater, Swarthmore. In 2001, he finally hit it big with sprawling family saga The Corrections, the definitive portrayal of domestic dysfunction in September 10th America. His latest book is 2006's The Discomfort Zone, an episodic memoir of growing up in '60s suburban St. Louis that displays a level of candor bordering on exhibitionism.

Of note

To produce The Corrections, Franzen says he locked himself away for four years in a Harlem studio where, in order to maximize creativity and keep his mind "free of all clichés," he typed wearing earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. It worked: The novel won the National Book Award and became one of this century's bestselling works of literary fiction. (Scott Rudin is now in the process of turning it into a movie.) Sales could have been even bigger, were it not for the fact that when the novel was selected for Oprah's book club, Franzen didn't bother to conceal his displeasure that his high-literary work would suffer the indignity of being co-opted by Oprah's middlebrow viewership. Oprah swiftly rescinded her invitation for Franzen to appear on her show.

Grudge

Franzen's arch nemesis is Ben Marcus, whose Harper's essay "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It" accused him of various sins against literature. He's no friend of Times book critic Michiko Kakutani either. In 2008, a Harvard student newspaper reported that Franzen had said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times."

Personal

Franzen separated from Valerie Cornell in 1994. A subsequent girlfriend, Kathryn Chetkovich, published an essay in Granta about her relationship with Franzen and how it didn't survive her jealousy of his success. He lives in a co-op on East 81st Street that he purchased in 2003.