Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen writes big, serious books for a culture often accused of having a shrunken attention span, and he makes people care. After two quieter novels, he detonated onto the literary scene with 'The Corrections,' a symphonic and pitilessly funny dissection of a Midwestern family unraveling at the turn of the millennium. The novel's success was crowned by a very public feud with Oprah Winfrey over her book club selection, cementing Franzen's image as a prickly defender of high-art fiction. He doubled down with 'Freedom,' another doorstop epic that traced the political and sexual entanglements of a liberal Minnesota clan, landing him on the cover of Time magazine. An avid birdwatcher and essayist, Franzen channels his deep anxieties about technology, environmental decay, and social fragmentation into narratives that are both meticulously observed and emotionally vast. He is a traditional storyteller wrestling with profoundly untraditional times.