Michael Chabon | |
|---|---|
 Chabon at San Diego Comic Con in 2019 | |
| Born | May 24, 1963 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Pen name | Leon Chaim Bach Malachi B. Cohen August Van Zorn |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Carnegie Mellon University University of Pittsburgh (BA) University of California, Irvine (MFA) |
| Period | 1987–present |
| Notable works | Wonder Boys (1995), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), Telegraph Avenue (2012), Moonglow: A Novel (2016) |
| Notable awards | 1999 O. Henry Award 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novel 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novel 2008 Sidewise Award for Alternate History |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 4 |
| Website | |
| Official website | |
Michael Chabon (/ˈʃeɪbɒn/ SHAY-bon;[1] born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer.[2] Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus.[3] It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.
His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards;[4][5][6] his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.
Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor[7] along with recurring themes such as nostalgia,[7] divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity.[3][8] He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work.[3][9] Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
- ^ Cohen, Patricia (April 29, 2007). "The Frozen Chosen". The New York Times. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ Henderson, Eleanor (2007). "From Pittsburgh to Sitka: On Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union". The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2007): 248–257. Archived from the original on October 10, 2009. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ a b c Leonard, John (June 14, 2007). "Meshuga Alaska" (First paragraph only free online). The New York Review of Books. 54 (10). Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ "2008 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. World Science Fiction Society. c. 2009. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ "Winners and Finalists". Sidewise Awards for Alternate History. Uchronia. n.d. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ "2008 Nebula Awards". The Nebula Awards. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Archived from the original on July 19, 2009. Retrieved July 3, 2009.
- ^ a b "Chabon, Michael – Introduction". Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 149. Gale Cengage, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. Retrieved on July 3, 2009.
- ^ Meyers, Helene, Reading Michael Chabon. Greenwood, 2010.
- ^ Binelli, Mark (September 27, 2001). "The Amazing Story of the Comic-Book Nerd Who Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction". Rolling Stone. No. 878. pp. 58–62, 78.