How He Came to Be Somewhere : An Interview and Three Early Stories

About Jonathan Franzen

JONATHAN FRANZEN WAS BORN IN 1959 in Chicago and grew up in St Louis, where his father was a civil engineer. He majored in German at Swarthmore College and from 1983 to 1987 worked part-time as an earthquake analyst for the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. After his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he received a Whiting Writers Award. His second novel, Strong Motion, appeared in 1992. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.