A short life of the author
Jonathan Earl Franzen (b. 1959) was born on 17 August 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the youngest of three sons. His father, Earl, was a civil engineer; his mother, Irene, was a homemaker. The family moved to Webster Groves, Missouri, a middle-class suburb of St. Louis, when Franzen was a child, and the culture, anxieties, and quiet desperation of Midwestern suburban life became the foundation of his fiction. He attended Swarthmore College, studied German in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship, and began writing seriously in the mid-1980s.
Life and Career
Franzen’s first two novels — The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), a conspiracy thriller set in St. Louis, and Strong Motion (1992), a novel about earthquakes and the chemical industry in Boston — were ambitious but commercially unsuccessful. Through the 1990s, as his first marriage collapsed and his literary career stalled, he wrote the famous 1996 Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream” (later revised as “Why Bother?”), which grappled with the question of whether the social novel could still matter in a culture dominated by electronic media.
The Corrections (2001) was the answer — a 568-page family saga centring on the Lambert family of St. Jude (a fictional Midwestern city) and their three adult children scattered across the East Coast. The novel’s portrait of an aging patriarch with Parkinson’s disease, a controlling mother determined to host one last Christmas dinner, and children struggling with infidelity, depression, and financial catastrophe was both a comic masterpiece and a devastating anatomy of American family life. It won the National Book Award and sold over three million copies.
The Oprah controversy — Franzen expressed ambivalence about the book club’s selection, Winfrey rescinded the invitation — made him a polarising public figure, the embodiment of literary snobbery for some and of artistic integrity for others.
Freedom (2010) was his most ambitious novel: a panoramic saga of the Berglund family of St. Paul, Minnesota, spanning the George W. Bush era and addressing environmentalism, the Iraq War, suburban malaise, and the meaning of freedom itself. Purity (2015) was set partly in East Germany and California and addressed surveillance, the internet, and family secrets.
Crossroads (2021) began a projected trilogy, “A Key to All Mythologies,” set in the 1970s and centring on a pastor’s family in a fictional Chicago suburb.
Major Works and Themes
Franzen’s subject is the American family as a site of love, failure, obligation, and mutual destruction. His novels are populated by intelligent, self-aware characters who understand their flaws and cannot fix them — who love badly, parent badly, and pursue happiness with the same neurotic intensity they bring to everything else.
The Corrections (2001) is his masterwork: a novel that operates simultaneously as a family comedy, a social novel, and a study of American capitalism, pharmaceuticals, and the decline of the Midwestern industrial economy.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Franzen is both widely admired and widely resented. His supporters regard him as the most important American social novelist since Updike; his detractors find his work self-important, his treatment of female characters problematic, and his public persona insufferable. He is, in either case, one of the central literary figures of the twenty-first century.
Key Works
- The Twenty-Seventh City (1988)
- Strong Motion (1992)
- The Corrections (2001)
- How to Be Alone: Essays (2002)
- The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006)
- Freedom (2010)
- Farther Away: Essays (2012)
- Purity (2015)
- Crossroads (2021)
Collecting Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is widely collected, with The Corrections as the centrepiece.
The Twenty-Seventh City (1988, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York) is his debut and genuinely scarce in fine first-edition condition. Copies in jacket bring $300–$800.
The Corrections (2001, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most commercially significant title. First editions in jacket bring $100–$400; signed copies $200–$600. The National Book Award boosted values.
Freedom (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) had a large first printing. First editions bring $50–$150.
Franzen signs at events but is not an enthusiastic promoter, and signed copies command moderate premiums.