Michael Chabon
Homepage : michaelchabon.com
Biography
Michael Chabon has become one of the preeminent literary authors of his generation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Chabon was born in 1963 and grew up in the suburbs of Columbia, Maryland with his parents Robert, a physician, lawyer, and hospital administrator, and Sharon, a lawyer. His parents divorced when he was about 11, and Michael Chabon lived with his mother. He grew up reading comic books and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer.
He earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984. In 1987, Chabon received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine.Michael Chabon's master's thesis at UC Irvine was the novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He never intended to publish the work, but his professor thought it was so good that he secretly sent the manuscript to an agent. Mysteries of Pittsburgh was published in 1988, and Michael received an astonishing $155,000 for the work, one of the highest figures ever paid for a first novel by a young, unknown fiction writer. The novel achieved him instant fame and success.
Chabon began writing and publishing short stories between 1987 and 1990, mostly in The New Yorker but also in Gentleman's Quarterly and Mademoiselle. His next novel, The Wonder Boys was published in 1995, and was made into a critically acclaimed movie by the same name in 2000. Clabon's third novel, The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Other works by Michael Chabon include A Model World, Werewolves in Their Youth, and a children's fantasy novel, Summerland
His other books include The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and Werewolves in Their Youth. His work has appeared in GQ, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, Forward, Civilization, Harper's, Vogue, and in a number of anthologies, among them Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards. He is also the author of screenplays, including The Gentleman Host and The Martian Agent, and the introductions to Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories by Ben Katchor (Little, Brown & Company, 1996). The Summer 2003 issue of The Paris Review published his novella The Final Solution.
Wonder Boys was adapted for film and released by Paramount Studios; film versions of several of Chabon's books are in the planning stages, including Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Summerland, and Hotzeplotz. He has written the script for the film version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is yet to be completed.
Chabon is currently working on a novel set in the Alaskan panhandle, where a territory was opened to European Jewish refugees for settlement during WWII. He currently lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, a writer of mysteries, and their four children.
Books
Introduction, D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths (New York Review of Books, 2005)
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (Fourth Estate, November 2004)
Contributor, My California: Journeys by Great Writers (Angel City Press, June 2004)
Editor, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage, 2004)
Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #1 (Dark Horse Comics, 2003)
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, editor (McSweeney's Issue 10, 2002, and Vintage, 2003)
Summerland (Miramax Books, 2002)
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, introduction (Oxford World's Classics; Oxford University Press, 2002)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House, 2000)
Werewolves in Their Youth (Random House, 1999)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (Little, Brown; September 1996)
Wonder Boys (Villard, 1995)
A Model World, and Other Stories (Morrow, 1991)
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Morrow, 1988)
Films
Snow and the Seven (2006, in production)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2005, in production)
Spiderman 2, writer (2004)
As himself in Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (2003)
Wonder Boys (2000)
Awards
Short-listed for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
New York Society Library Award, 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Gold Medal, Commonwealth Club of California, 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Library Association Notable Books 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, 2001,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Scripter Award, Friends of the University of Southern California Libraries, 2000,
Wonder Boys
National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2000,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Henry Award, 1999,
Wonder Boys
Publishers Weekly Best Books, 1995,
Wonder Boys
New York Times Notable Book, 1995,
Wonder Boys
Press and Interviews
November 2003
The Seattle Times
Historical 'What-Ifs' Key to Chabon Novel
By Stuart Eskenazi
"Michael Chabon stumbled on the stranger-than-fiction basis for his next novel when he read about a proposal to provide a home in Alaska for Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler."
July 2003
The San Francisco Chronicle
A Novel Idea; Finding a literary niche in the Elmwood
By Sam Whiting
"Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman keep to a rigid schedule at their Berkeley brown-shingle home in Elmwood. He writes at night. She writes by day. The system has worked for nine novels in 10 years, and in passing, four kids in nine."
May 2003
SF Weekly (CA)
Best Local Writer: Michael Chabon
"Most notably, his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay—an epic tale of comic book creators in mid-20th-century New York—was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Given Chabon's industrious body of work, it's hard to believe he has time for anything else, but he frequently gives readings, lectures, and interviews around the Bay Area."
2003
The Believer
Underway
"I am working on a novel, working title Hotzeplotz. It's set in the Alaskan panhandle, in the present day, in the territory that was opened to the Jewish refugees of Europe, after Congress passed the King-Havenner Bill of 1940, for settlement during WWII."
December 2002
The New York Times
U.S. Writers Do Cultural Battle Around the Globe
By Michael Z. Wise
"The Bush administration has recruited prominent American writers to contribute to a State Department anthology and give readings around the globe in a campaign started after 9/11 to use culture to further American diplomatic interests."
May 2002
Oct. 2001
The New York Times
Making Books; Novelists Court the Braces Set
By Martin Arnold
"The question is, if writers of adult books want to be inhabitants of the children's book world, do the writers, of necessity, change prose styles? The answer is, they shouldn't."
Commonwealthclub.org
Good Lit: Michael Chabon in Conversation
By Barbara Lane
"There were lots of other stories about different rabbis making golems, but for some reason, this is the one that caught the imagination, not just of Jewish listeners over the centuries, but of novelists."
May 2001
NPR
Audio Reading by Chabon
"While Chabon was writing the novel, he did quite a bit of research on the golem—"
November 2000
The Onion
Interview
By Scott Tobias
"In his mid-20s, as a creative-writing graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, Michael Chabon submitted as his master's thesis a brisk novel about a confused young man coming to terms with his sexuality."
October 2000
Powells.com
Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures
By Dave Weich
"I definitely had a desire to try something bigger, but I've had that desire for a while."
October 2000
Book Page
Super and Less-Than-Superheroes: A talk with the amazing Chabon
By Ellen Kanner
"Superhuman strength, x-ray vision, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound—Superman's got it all, believes author Michael Chabon. But if Chabon were a comic book superhero himself, he thinks he would have been 'one of the also-rans.'"
July 1995
Critics' Choice
Interview
By Dave Edelman
"I worked for a little over five years on a book called Fountain City. It was very complicated and ill-conceived and in the end I decided to abandon it."
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