Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon born May 24 1963 is an American novelist screenwriter columnist and short story writer Born in Washington DC 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 Chabons first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 1988 was published when he was 25 He followed it with Wonder Boys 1995 and two shortstory collections In 2000 he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabons magnum opus It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 His novel The Yiddish Policemens Union an alternate history mystery novel was published in 2007 and won the Hugo Sidewise Nebula and Ignotus awards 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 twentyfirst 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 Chabons mothers California home in 1989 Chabons work is characterized by complex language and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia divorce abandonment fatherhood and most notably issues of Jewish identity He often includes gay bisexual and Jewish characters in his work 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 plotdriven fiction and along with novels has published screenplays childrens books comics and newspaper serials Chabon pronounced in his words Shea as in Shea Stadium Bon as in Bon Jovi ie ??e?b?n was born in Washington DC to a Jewish family His parents are Robert Chabon a physician and lawyer and Sharon Chabon a lawyer Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when at the age of ten he wrote his first short story for a class assignment When the story received an A he recalls I thought to myself Thats it Thats what I want to do I can do this And I never had any second thoughts or doubts Referring to popular culture he wrote of being raised on a hearty diet of crap His parents divorced when he was 11 and he grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and Columbia Maryland Columbia where he lived nine months of the year with his mother was a progressive planned living community in which racial economic and religious diversity were actively fostered He has written of his mothers marijuana use recalling her sometime around 1977 or so sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathys car passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mothers parents and siblings Source Article Michael Chabon from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30