Jonathan Lethem
| Jonathan Lethem | |
|---|---|
at the National Book Critics Circle Awards
(March 2012) |
|
| Born | Jonathan Allen Lethem February 19, 1964 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Pen name | Harry Conklin |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, short story writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1989–present |
| Notable works |
Motherless Brooklyn (1999) The Fortress of Solitude (2003) |
| Notable awards | National Book Critics Circle Award, World Fantasy Award |
| Spouse |
Shelley Jackson (1987-1997) Julia Rosenberg (2000-2002) Amy Barrett |
| Children | Everett Barrett Lethem |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels.
In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."
...
Wikipedia