Michael Chabon
Encyclopedia
Michael Chabon is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation", according to The Virginia Quarterly Review
.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
(1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys
(1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus
; it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
in 2001 (see: 2001 in literature
). His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union
, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo
, Sidewise
, Nebula
and Ignotus
awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road
appeared in book form in the fall of that same year.
His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor
along with recurring themes, including 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, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction
and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials
.
, Bon as in Bon Jovi
", i.e., ˈ) was born in Washington, DC to 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, Chabon recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's 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 Chabon was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Columbia
, Maryland. Columbia, where Chabon 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 mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy’s car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie."
Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University
for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh
, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine
, where he received a Master of Fine Arts
in creative writing.
, was written as his UC-Irvine master's thesis. Without telling Chabon, his professor, Donald Heiney
(better known by his pen name, MacDonald Harris), sent it to a literary agent, who got the author an impressive $155,000 advance on the novel (most first-time novelists receive advances ranging from $5,000 to $7,500.) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and became a bestseller, instantly catapulting Chabon to the status of literary celebrity. Among Chabon's major literary influences in this period were Donald Barthelme
, Jorge Luis Borges
, Gabriel García Márquez
, Raymond Chandler
, John Updike
, Philip Roth
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
. As Chabon remarked in 2010, "I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to, and I think that's probably the best way to learn."
Chabon was ambivalent about his newfound fame. He turned down offers to appear in a Gap
ad and to be featured as one of People
s "50 Most Beautiful People." (He later said, of the People offer, "I don't give a shit [about it] ... I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, 'We want to put you in a magazine because the weather's so nice where you live' ")
In 2001, Chabon reflected on the success of his first novel by saying that while "the upside was that I was published and I got a readership[, the] downside ... was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, 'Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?' It took me a few years to catch up." In 1991, Chabon published A Model World
, a collection of short stories, many of which had been published previously in The New Yorker
.
Fountain City and Wonder Boys After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent five years working on a second novel. Called Fountain City, the novel was a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida", and it eventually ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, "never felt like I was conceptually on steady ground."
At one point, Chabon submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work. Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though. "It was really scary", he said later. "I'd already signed a contract and been paid all this money. And then I'd gotten a divorce and half the money was already with my ex-wife. My instincts were telling me, This book is fucked. Just drop it. But I didn't, because I thought, What if I have to give the money back?" "I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead."
When he finally decided to abandon Fountain City, Chabon recalls staring at his blank computer for hours, before suddenly picturing "a 'straitlaced, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama' trying to end it all." He began writing, and within a couple of days, had written 50 pages of what would become his second novel, Wonder Boys
. Chabon drew on his experiences with Fountain City for the character of Grady Tripp, a frustrated novelist who has spent years working on an immense fourth novel. The author wrote Wonder Boys in a dizzy seven-month streak, without telling his agent or publisher he'd abandoned Fountain City. The book, published in 1995, was a commercial and critical success.
In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from the unfinished 1,500 page manuscript Fountain City "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript" written by Chabon was included in McSweeney's 36.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Among the supporters of Wonder Boys was The Washington Post
critic Jonathan Yardley
; however, despite declaring Chabon "the young star of American letters", Yardley argued that, in his works to that point, Chabon had been preoccupied "with fictional explorations of his own ... It is time for him to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds." Chabon later said that he took Yardley's criticism to heart, explaining, "It chimed with my own thoughts. I had bigger ambitions." In 1999 he published his second collection of short stories, Werewolves in their Youth, which included his first published foray into genre fiction
, the grim horror story "In the Black Mill."
Shortly after completing Wonder Boys, Chabon discovered a box of comic books from his childhood; a reawakened interest in comics, coupled with memories of the "lore" his Brooklyn
-born father had told him about "the middle years of the twentieth century in America....the radio shows, politicians, movies, music, and athletes, and so forth, of that era," inspired him to begin work on a new novel. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
, an epic historical novel
that charts 16 years in the lives of Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two Jewish cousins who create a wildly popular series of comic books in the early 1940s, the years leading up to the entry of the U.S. into World War II. The novel received "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller
, eventually winning the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
. Chabon reflected that, in writing Kavalier & Clay, "I discovered strengths I had hoped that I possessed — the ability to pull off multiple points of view, historical settings, the passage of years — but which had never been tested before."
Summerland, The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union In 2002, Chabon published Summerland
, a fantasy novel written for younger readers that received mixed reviews but sold extremely well, and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
. Two years later, he published The Final Solution, a novella about an investigation led by an unknown old man, whom the reader can guess to be Sherlock Holmes
, during the final years of World War II. His Dark Horse Comics
project The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist
, a quarterly anthology series that was published from 2004 to 2006, purported to cull stories from an involved, fictitious 60-year history of the Escapist character created by the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It was awarded the 2005 Eisner Award
for Best Anthology and a pair of Harvey Awards for Best Anthology and Best New Series.
In late 2006, Chabon completed work on Gentlemen of the Road
, a 15-part serialized novel that ran in The New York Times Magazine
from January 28 to May 6, 2007. The serial (which at one point had the working title "Jews with Swords") was described by Chabon as "a swashbuckling adventure story set around the year 1000." Just before Gentlemen of the Road completed its run, the author published his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
, which he had worked on since February 2002. A hard-boiled detective story that imagines an alternate history in which Israel
collapsed in 1948 and European Jews settled in Alaska
, the novel was launched on May 1, 2007 to enthusiastic reviews, and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel also won the 2008 Hugo Award
.
Manhood for Amateurs and Telegraph Avenue In May 2007, Chabon said that he was working on a young-adult novel with "some fantastic content". A month later, the author said he had put plans for the young-adult book on hold, and instead had signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins
.
The first a book-length work of non-fiction called Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son published in spring 2009 (2010 in Europe); the work discusses "being a man in all its complexity — a son, a father, a husband." The collection was nominated for a 2010 Northern California Book Award in the Creative Nonfiction category. This was Chabon's second published collection of essays and non-fiction. McSweeney's
published Maps and Legends
, a collection of Chabon's literary essays, on May 1, 2008. Proceeds from the book benefited 826 National
. Also in 2008, Chabon received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
, presented annually by the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Library Trust
.
Chabon's second book under the contract, with a tentative publication date of 2011, will be a contemporary adult novel set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area
. During a 2007 interview with the Washington Post, Chabon was quoted as saying, "I would like it to be set in the present day and feel right now the urge to do something more mainstream than my recent work has been." During a Q&A session in January 2009, Chabon added that he was writing a "naturalistic" novel about two families in Berkeley. In a March 2010 interview with the Guardian newspaper, Chabon confirmed that the novel-in-progress was still very much naturalistic and that "So far there's no overtly genre content: it's set in the present day and has no alternate reality or anything like that." In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on December 7, 2010, Chabon said that he hopes to submit the novel in 2011 and that its provisional title is Telegraph Avenue.
Despite his success, Chabon continues to perceive himself as a "failure", noting that "anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favorable word."
In June 2010 he wrote an editorial for the New York Times in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botched Gaza flotilla raid
and the explanations that followed.
article on up-and-coming gay writers (Pittsburghs protagonist has liaisons with people of both sexes.) The New York Times
later reported that "in some ways, [Chabon] was happy" for the magazine's error, and quoted him as saying, "I feel very lucky about all of that. It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one." In a 2002 interview, Chabon added, "if Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it's that people can't be put into categories all that easily." In "On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh", an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2005, Chabon remarked on the autobiographical events that helped inspire his first novel: "I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him."
According to Chabon, the popularity of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse effects; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the success created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic." He and Groth divorced in 1991, and he married the writer Ayelet Waldman
in 1993. They currently live together in Berkeley
, California with their four children, Sophie (b. 1994), Ezekiel "Zeke" Napoleon Waldman (b. 1997), Ida-Rose (b. June 1, 2001), and Abraham Wolf Waldman (b. March 31, 2003). Chabon has said that the "creative freeflow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and
Rosa Saks towards the end of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and in 2007, Entertainment Weekly
declared the couple "a famous — and famously in love — writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles
with word processors and not so much booze."
In 2000, Chabon told The New York Times that he kept a strict schedule, writing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, "There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.... The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life."
and plot. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was, like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, an essentially realistic, contemporary novel (whose plot happened to revolve around comic-book superheroes), Chabon's subsequent works — such as The Final Solution, his dabbling with comic-book writing, and the "swashbuckling adventure" of Gentlemen of the Road — have been almost exclusively devoted to mixing aspects of genre and literary fiction. Perhaps the most notable example of this is The Yiddish Policemen's Union
, which won five genre awards, including the Hugo award
and Nebula award
. Chabon seeks to "annihilate" not the genres themselves, but the bias against certain genres of fiction such as fantasy, science fiction and romance.
Chabon's forays into genre fiction have met with mixed critical reaction. One science fiction short story by Chabon, "The Martian Agent," was described by a reviewer as "enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker." Another critic wrote of the same story that it was "richly plotted, action-packed," and that "Chabon skilfully elaborates his world and draws not just on the steampunk
worlds of William Gibson
, Bruce Sterling
and Michael Moorcock
, but on alternate histories by brilliant SF mavericks such as Avram Davidson
and Howard Waldrop
. The imperial politics are craftily resonant and the story keeps us hanging on." While The Village Voice
called The Final Solution "an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism
, and a mash note to the beloved boys' tales of Chabon's youth", The Boston Globe
wrote, "[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance," and The New York Times added that the detective story, "a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer."
In 2005, Chabon argued against the idea that genre fiction and entertaining fiction should not appeal to "the real writer", saying that the common perception is that "Entertainment ... means junk.... [But] maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.... I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."
One of the more positive responses to Chabon's brand of "trickster literature" appeared in Time
magazine, whose Lev Grossman
wrote that "This is literature in mid-transformation .... the highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, [and] you can almost see the future of literature coming." Grossman classed Chabon with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Jonathan Lethem
(with whom Chabon is friends), Margaret Atwood
, and Susanna Clarke
.
On the other hand, in Slate
in 2007, Ruth Franklin said, "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."
stories that were "in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft
... but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom." A horror-themed short story titled "In the Black Mill" was published in Playboy
in June 1997 and reprinted in Chabon's 1999 story collection Werewolves in Their Youth, and was attributed to Van Zorn.
Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn, along with an equally fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre named Leon Chaim Bach. Bach's now-defunct website (which existed under the auspices of Chabon's) declared Van Zorn to be, "without question, the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century," and mentioned that Bach had once edited a collection of short stories by Van Zorn titled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg. (The name "Leon Chaim Bach" is an anagram
of "Michael Chabon," as is "Malachi B. Cohen," the name of a fictional comics expert who wrote occasional essays about the Escapist for the character's Dark Horse Comic series.) In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe
and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn." The first recipient of the prize was Jason Roberts
, whose winning story, "7C", was then included in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Chabon.
A scene in the film adaptation of Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh shows two characters in a bookstore stocking August Van Zorn books.
for the Pittsburgh Pirates
who died abruptly after crashing his car on Mt. Nebo Road. The most detailed exposition of Drinkwater's life appears in Chabon's 1990 short story "Smoke," which is set at Drinkwater's funeral, and refers to him as "a scholarly catcher, a redoubtable batsman, and a kind, affectionate person." Drinkwater was again referred to (though not by name) in Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys, in which narrator Grady Tripp explains that his sportswriter friend Happy Blackmore was hired "to ghost the autobiography of a catcher, a rising star who played for Pittsburgh and hit the sort of home runs that linger in the memory for years." Tripp explains that Blackmore turned in an inadequate draft, his book contract was cancelled, and the catcher died shortly afterwards, "leaving nothing in Happy's notorious 'files' but the fragments and scribblings of a ghost." In Chabon's children's book Summerland (2002), it is suggested that Blackmore was eventually able to find a publisher for the biography; the character Jennifer T. mentions that she has read a book called Eli Drinkwater: A Life in Baseball, written by Happy Blackmore. Drinkwater's name may have been selected in homage to contemporary author John Crowley
, whom Chabon is on the record as admiring. Crowley's novel Little, Big
featured a main character named Alice Drinkwater.
There are also instances in which character surnames reappear from story to story. Cleveland Arning, a character in Chabon's 1988 debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, is described as having come from a wealthy family, one that might be expected to be able to endow
a building. Near the end of Wonder Boys (1995), it is mentioned that, on the unnamed college campus at which Grady Tripp teaches, there is a building called Arning Hall "where the English faculty kept office hours." Similarly, in Chabon’s 1989 short story "A Model World," a character named Levine discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for "nephokinesis" (or cloud control) that wins him respect and prominence in the meteorological
field. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a passing reference is made to the "massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology," ostensibly a building owned by New York University
.
, a romantic comedy "about old Jewish folks on a third-rate cruise ship out of Miami". Rudin bought the project and developed it with Chabon, but it was never filmed, partly due to the release of the similarly themed film Out to Sea
in 1997. In the nineties, Chabon also pitched story ideas for both the
X-Men
and the Fantastic Four
movies, but was rejected.
When Scott Rudin was adapting Wonder Boys for the screen, the author declined an offer to write the screenplay, saying he was too busy writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Directed by Curtis Hanson
and starring Michael Douglas
, Wonder Boys
was released in 2000 to critical acclaim and financial failure. Having bought the film rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Rudin then asked Chabon to work on that film's screenplay. Although Chabon spent 16 months in 2001 and 2002 working on the novel's film adaptation, the project has been mired in pre-production for years.
Chabon's work, however, remains popular in Hollywood, with Rudin purchasing the film rights to The Yiddish Policemen's Union in 2002, five years before the book would be published. The same year, Miramax bought the rights to Summerland and Tales of Mystery and Imagination (a planned collection of eight genre short stories that Chabon has not yet written), each of which was optioned for a sum in the mid-six figures. Chabon also wrote a draft for 2004's Spider-Man 2
, about a third of which was used in the final film. Soon after Spider-Man 2 was released, director Sam Raimi
mentioned that he hoped to hire Chabon to work on the film's sequel, "if I can get him," but Chabon never worked on Spider-Man 3
.
In October 2004, it was announced that Chabon was at work writing Disney's Snow and the Seven, a live-action martial arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
to be directed by master Hong Kong fight choreographer and director Yuen Wo Ping. In August 2006, Chabon said that he had been replaced on Snow, sarcastically explaining that the producers wanted to go in "more of a fun direction."
Although Chabon is uninvolved with the project, director Rawson Marshall Thurber
shot a film adaptation
of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in fall 2006. The film, which stars Sienna Miller
and Peter Sarsgaard
, was released in April 2008. In February 2008, Scott Rudin reported that a film adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union was in pre-production, to be written and directed by the Coen brothers
.
In April 2009, Chabon confirmed he had been hired to do revisions to the script for Disney's
John Carter of Mars
.
The Virginia Quarterly Review
The Virginia Quarterly Review is a literary magazine in the United States. It was founded in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, at the request of University of Virginia president E. A. Alderman...
.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 1988 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The story is a coming-of-age tale set during the early 1980s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....
(1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys is a 1995 novel by the American writer Michael Chabon. It was adapted into a film in 2000.-Plot summary:Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land...
(1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins before, during, and after World War II. They are a Czech artist named Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born...
, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
; it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
in 2001 (see: 2001 in literature
2001 in literature
The year 2001 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The film version of J. R. R. Tolkien's classic book, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, is released to movie theaters...
). His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in...
, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
, Sidewise
Sidewise Award for Alternate History
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize the best alternate history stories and novels of the year.The awards take their name from the 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time" by Murray Leinster, in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with...
, Nebula
Nebula Award
The Nebula Award is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America , for the best science fiction/fantasy fiction published in the United States during the previous year...
and Ignotus
Premio Ignotus
Premios Ignotus are annual Spanish literary awards that were created in 1991 by the Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror . The awards, which are in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by members of Hispacon, the national science fiction convention of Spain...
awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road
Gentlemen of the Road
Gentlemen of the Road is a 2007 serial novel by American author Michael Chabon. It is a "swashbuckling adventure" set in the kaganate of Khazaria around AD 950...
appeared in book form in the fall of that same year.
His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity
Jewish identity
Jewish identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as a Jew and as relating to being Jewish. Under the broader definition, the Jewish identity does not depend on whether or not a person is regarded as a Jew by others, or by an external set of religious, or legal, or...
. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction
Genre fiction
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....
and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials
Serial (literature)
In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...
.
Early years
Michael Chabon ' onMouseout='HidePop("48956")' href="/topics/Shea_Stadium">Shea StadiumShea Stadium
William A. Shea Municipal Stadium, usually shortened to Shea Stadium or just Shea , was a stadium in the New York City borough of Queens, in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park. It was the home baseball park of Major League Baseball's New York Mets from 1964 to 2008...
, Bon as in Bon Jovi
Bon Jovi
Bon Jovi is an American rock band from Sayreville, New Jersey. Formed in 1983, Bon Jovi consists of lead singer and namesake Jon Bon Jovi , guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, as well as current bassist Hugh McDonald...
", i.e., ˈ) was born in Washington, DC to 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, Chabon recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's 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 Chabon was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Columbia
Columbia, Maryland
Columbia is a planned community that consists of ten self-contained villages, located in Howard County, Maryland, United States. It began with the idea that a city could enhance its residents' quality of life. Creator and developer James W. Rouse saw the new community in terms of human values, not...
, Maryland. Columbia, where Chabon 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 mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy’s car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie."
Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...
, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
, where he received a Master of Fine Arts
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...
in creative writing.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and initial literary success
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of PittsburghThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 1988 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The story is a coming-of-age tale set during the early 1980s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....
, was written as his UC-Irvine master's thesis. Without telling Chabon, his professor, Donald Heiney
Donald Heiney
Donald Heiney was a sailor and academic as well as a prolific and inventive writer using the pseudonym of MacDonald Harris for fiction.Heiney was born in South Pasadena, California, and grew up in South Pasadena and San Gabriel. He served in the Merchant Marine and the Navy during World War II...
(better known by his pen name, MacDonald Harris), sent it to a literary agent, who got the author an impressive $155,000 advance on the novel (most first-time novelists receive advances ranging from $5,000 to $7,500.) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and became a bestseller, instantly catapulting Chabon to the status of literary celebrity. Among Chabon's major literary influences in this period were Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction Donald...
, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
, Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
, John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
, Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
. As Chabon remarked in 2010, "I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to, and I think that's probably the best way to learn."
Chabon was ambivalent about his newfound fame. He turned down offers to appear in a Gap
Gap (clothing retailer)
The Gap, Inc. is an American clothing and accessories retailer based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 1969 by Donald G. Fisher and Doris F. Fisher. The company has five primary brands: the namesake Gap banner, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime and Athleta. As of September 2008,...
ad and to be featured as one of People
People (magazine)
In 1998, the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens called Teen People. However, on July 27, 2006, the company announced it would shut down publication of Teen People immediately. The last issue to be released was scheduled for September 2006. Subscribers to this magazine received...
s "50 Most Beautiful People." (He later said, of the People offer, "I don't give a shit [about it] ... I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, 'We want to put you in a magazine because the weather's so nice where you live' ")
In 2001, Chabon reflected on the success of his first novel by saying that while "the upside was that I was published and I got a readership[, the] downside ... was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, 'Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?' It took me a few years to catch up." In 1991, Chabon published A Model World
A Model World and Other Stories
A Model World and Other Stories is a 1991 collection of short stories by Michael Chabon. It was his first story collection and second book, following the 1988 novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.-Table of Contents:*Part I: A Model World...
, a collection of short stories, many of which had been published previously in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
.
Fountain City and Wonder Boys After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent five years working on a second novel. Called Fountain City, the novel was a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida", and it eventually ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, "never felt like I was conceptually on steady ground."
At one point, Chabon submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work. Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though. "It was really scary", he said later. "I'd already signed a contract and been paid all this money. And then I'd gotten a divorce and half the money was already with my ex-wife. My instincts were telling me, This book is fucked. Just drop it. But I didn't, because I thought, What if I have to give the money back?" "I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead."
When he finally decided to abandon Fountain City, Chabon recalls staring at his blank computer for hours, before suddenly picturing "a 'straitlaced, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama' trying to end it all." He began writing, and within a couple of days, had written 50 pages of what would become his second novel, Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys is a 1995 novel by the American writer Michael Chabon. It was adapted into a film in 2000.-Plot summary:Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land...
. Chabon drew on his experiences with Fountain City for the character of Grady Tripp, a frustrated novelist who has spent years working on an immense fourth novel. The author wrote Wonder Boys in a dizzy seven-month streak, without telling his agent or publisher he'd abandoned Fountain City. The book, published in 1995, was a commercial and critical success.
In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from the unfinished 1,500 page manuscript Fountain City "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript" written by Chabon was included in McSweeney's 36.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Among the supporters of Wonder Boys was The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
critic Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley is a book critic at The Washington Post, and at one time of the Washington Star. In 1981 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.-Background and education:...
; however, despite declaring Chabon "the young star of American letters", Yardley argued that, in his works to that point, Chabon had been preoccupied "with fictional explorations of his own ... It is time for him to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds." Chabon later said that he took Yardley's criticism to heart, explaining, "It chimed with my own thoughts. I had bigger ambitions." In 1999 he published his second collection of short stories, Werewolves in their Youth, which included his first published foray into genre fiction
Genre fiction
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....
, the grim horror story "In the Black Mill."
Shortly after completing Wonder Boys, Chabon discovered a box of comic books from his childhood; a reawakened interest in comics, coupled with memories of the "lore" his Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
-born father had told him about "the middle years of the twentieth century in America....the radio shows, politicians, movies, music, and athletes, and so forth, of that era," inspired him to begin work on a new novel. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins before, during, and after World War II. They are a Czech artist named Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born...
, an epic historical novel
Historical fiction
Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...
that charts 16 years in the lives of Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two Jewish cousins who create a wildly popular series of comic books in the early 1940s, the years leading up to the entry of the U.S. into World War II. The novel received "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
, eventually winning the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
. Chabon reflected that, in writing Kavalier & Clay, "I discovered strengths I had hoped that I possessed — the ability to pull off multiple points of view, historical settings, the passage of years — but which had never been tested before."
Summerland, The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union In 2002, Chabon published Summerland
Summerland (novel)
Summerland is a 2002 fantasy young adult novel by American writer Michael Chabon. It is about young children who save the world from destruction by playing baseball, the central theme and symbol throughout the novel. Summerland weaves elements of a World Series, parallel-universe road trip, and a...
, a fantasy novel written for younger readers that received mixed reviews but sold extremely well, and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
Mythopoeic Awards
The Mythopoeic Awards for literature and literary studies are given by the Mythopoeic Society to authors of outstanding works in the fields of myth, fantasy, and the scholarly study of these areas; the full criteria and description can be read on the Mythopoeic Society's -Mythopoeic Fantasy...
. Two years later, he published The Final Solution, a novella about an investigation led by an unknown old man, whom the reader can guess to be Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
, during the final years of World War II. His Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics is the largest independent American comic book and manga publisher.Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon, with the concept of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals. Richardson started out by opening his first comic book...
project The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist
The Escapist (character)
The Escapist is a metafictional character, a comic book hero in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, written by Michael Chabon, created as an homage to the heroes of the period known to fans and historians as the Golden Age of Comic Books...
, a quarterly anthology series that was published from 2004 to 2006, purported to cull stories from an involved, fictitious 60-year history of the Escapist character created by the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It was awarded the 2005 Eisner Award
Eisner Award
The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
for Best Anthology and a pair of Harvey Awards for Best Anthology and Best New Series.
In late 2006, Chabon completed work on Gentlemen of the Road
Gentlemen of the Road
Gentlemen of the Road is a 2007 serial novel by American author Michael Chabon. It is a "swashbuckling adventure" set in the kaganate of Khazaria around AD 950...
, a 15-part serialized novel that ran in The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
from January 28 to May 6, 2007. The serial (which at one point had the working title "Jews with Swords") was described by Chabon as "a swashbuckling adventure story set around the year 1000." Just before Gentlemen of the Road completed its run, the author published his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in...
, which he had worked on since February 2002. A hard-boiled detective story that imagines an alternate history in which Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
collapsed in 1948 and European Jews settled in Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
, the novel was launched on May 1, 2007 to enthusiastic reviews, and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel also won the 2008 Hugo Award
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
.
Manhood for Amateurs and Telegraph Avenue In May 2007, Chabon said that he was working on a young-adult novel with "some fantastic content". A month later, the author said he had put plans for the young-adult book on hold, and instead had signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
.
The first a book-length work of non-fiction called Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son published in spring 2009 (2010 in Europe); the work discusses "being a man in all its complexity — a son, a father, a husband." The collection was nominated for a 2010 Northern California Book Award in the Creative Nonfiction category. This was Chabon's second published collection of essays and non-fiction. McSweeney's
McSweeney's
McSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...
published Maps and Legends
Maps and Legends
Maps and Legends is an essay collection by American author Michael Chabon that was scheduled for official release on May 1, 2008, although some copies shipped two weeks early from various online bookstores. The book is Chabon's first book-length foray into nonfiction, with 16 essays, some...
, a collection of Chabon's literary essays, on May 1, 2008. Proceeds from the book benefited 826 National
826 National
826 National is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students, ages 6–18, with expository and creative writing at eight locations across the USA...
. Also in 2008, Chabon received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
Helmerich Award
The Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is an American literary prize awarded by the Tulsa Library Trust in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is bestowed annually upon an "internationally acclaimed" author who has "written a distinguished body of work and made a major contribution to the field of...
, presented annually by the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Library Trust
Tulsa City-County Library
The Tulsa City-County Library is the major public library system in Tulsa County, Oklahoma.-Overview:The library system serves those who live, work, go to school in, own land in, or pay property taxes on land in Tulsa County. There are 25 branches in the system: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,...
.
Chabon's second book under the contract, with a tentative publication date of 2011, will be a contemporary adult novel set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
. During a 2007 interview with the Washington Post, Chabon was quoted as saying, "I would like it to be set in the present day and feel right now the urge to do something more mainstream than my recent work has been." During a Q&A session in January 2009, Chabon added that he was writing a "naturalistic" novel about two families in Berkeley. In a March 2010 interview with the Guardian newspaper, Chabon confirmed that the novel-in-progress was still very much naturalistic and that "So far there's no overtly genre content: it's set in the present day and has no alternate reality or anything like that." In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on December 7, 2010, Chabon said that he hopes to submit the novel in 2011 and that its provisional title is Telegraph Avenue.
Despite his success, Chabon continues to perceive himself as a "failure", noting that "anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favorable word."
In June 2010 he wrote an editorial for the New York Times in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botched Gaza flotilla raid
Gaza flotilla raid
The Gaza flotilla raid was a military operation by Israel against six ships of the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" on 31 May 2010 in international waters of the Mediterranean Sea...
and the explanations that followed.
Personal life
In 1987, Chabon married the poet Lollie Groth. After the publication of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he was mistakenly featured in a NewsweekNewsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
article on up-and-coming gay writers (Pittsburghs protagonist has liaisons with people of both sexes.) The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
later reported that "in some ways, [Chabon] was happy" for the magazine's error, and quoted him as saying, "I feel very lucky about all of that. It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one." In a 2002 interview, Chabon added, "if Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it's that people can't be put into categories all that easily." In "On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh", an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2005, Chabon remarked on the autobiographical events that helped inspire his first novel: "I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him."
According to Chabon, the popularity of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse effects; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the success created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic." He and Groth divorced in 1991, and he married the writer Ayelet Waldman
Ayelet Waldman
Ayelet Waldman is a novelist and essayist who was formerly a lawyer. She is noted for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing about the changing expectations of motherhood...
in 1993. They currently live together in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, California with their four children, Sophie (b. 1994), Ezekiel "Zeke" Napoleon Waldman (b. 1997), Ida-Rose (b. June 1, 2001), and Abraham Wolf Waldman (b. March 31, 2003). Chabon has said that the "creative freeflow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and
Rosa Saks towards the end of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and in 2007, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
declared the couple "a famous — and famously in love — writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles
Nick and Nora Charles
Nick and Nora Charles are fictional characters created by Dashiell Hammett in his novel The Thin Man. The characters were later adapted for film in a series of movies between 1934 and 1947; for radio from 1941 to 1950; for television from 1957 through 1959; as a Broadway musical in 1991; and as a...
with word processors and not so much booze."
In 2000, Chabon told The New York Times that he kept a strict schedule, writing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, "There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.... The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life."
Interest in genre fiction
In a 2002 essay, Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction (including his own), saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." In an apparent reaction against these "plotless [stories] sparkling with epiphanic dew", Chabon's post-2000 work has been marked by an increased interest in genre fictionGenre fiction
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....
and plot. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was, like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, an essentially realistic, contemporary novel (whose plot happened to revolve around comic-book superheroes), Chabon's subsequent works — such as The Final Solution, his dabbling with comic-book writing, and the "swashbuckling adventure" of Gentlemen of the Road — have been almost exclusively devoted to mixing aspects of genre and literary fiction. Perhaps the most notable example of this is The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in...
, which won five genre awards, including the Hugo award
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
and Nebula award
Nebula Award
The Nebula Award is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America , for the best science fiction/fantasy fiction published in the United States during the previous year...
. Chabon seeks to "annihilate" not the genres themselves, but the bias against certain genres of fiction such as fantasy, science fiction and romance.
Chabon's forays into genre fiction have met with mixed critical reaction. One science fiction short story by Chabon, "The Martian Agent," was described by a reviewer as "enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker." Another critic wrote of the same story that it was "richly plotted, action-packed," and that "Chabon skilfully elaborates his world and draws not just on the steampunk
Steampunk
Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. Steampunk involves a setting where steam power is still widely used—usually Victorian era Britain or "Wild West"-era United...
worlds of William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
, Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
and Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
, but on alternate histories by brilliant SF mavericks such as Avram Davidson
Avram Davidson
Avram Davidson was an American writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as the author of many stories that do not fit into a genre niche...
and Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop is a science fiction author who works primarily in short fiction.Waldrop's stories combine elements such as alternate history, American popular culture, the American South, old movies , classical mythology, and rock 'n' roll music. His style is sometimes obscure or elliptical...
. The imperial politics are craftily resonant and the story keeps us hanging on." While The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
called The Final Solution "an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism
Ventriloquism
Ventriloquism, or ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from elsewhere, usually a puppeteered "dummy"...
, and a mash note to the beloved boys' tales of Chabon's youth", The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
wrote, "[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance," and The New York Times added that the detective story, "a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer."
In 2005, Chabon argued against the idea that genre fiction and entertaining fiction should not appeal to "the real writer", saying that the common perception is that "Entertainment ... means junk.... [But] maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.... I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."
One of the more positive responses to Chabon's brand of "trickster literature" appeared in Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, whose Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp , Codex , The Magicians and The Magician King...
wrote that "This is literature in mid-transformation .... the highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, [and] you can almost see the future of literature coming." Grossman classed Chabon with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem 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...
(with whom Chabon is friends), Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...
, and Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke
Susanna Mary Clarke is a British author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , a Hugo Award-winning alternate history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time...
.
On the other hand, in Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
in 2007, Ruth Franklin said, "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."
The Van Zorn persona
For some of his own genre work, Chabon has forged an unusual horror/fantasy fiction persona under the name of August Van Zorn. More elaborately developed than a pseudonym, August Van Zorn is purported to be a pen name for one Albert Vetch (1899–1963). In Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys, narrator Grady Tripp writes that he grew up in the same hotel as Vetch, who worked as an English professor at the (nonexistent) Coxley College and wrote hundreds of pulpPulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
stories that were "in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
... but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom." A horror-themed short story titled "In the Black Mill" was published in Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
in June 1997 and reprinted in Chabon's 1999 story collection Werewolves in Their Youth, and was attributed to Van Zorn.
Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn, along with an equally fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre named Leon Chaim Bach. Bach's now-defunct website (which existed under the auspices of Chabon's) declared Van Zorn to be, "without question, the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century," and mentioned that Bach had once edited a collection of short stories by Van Zorn titled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg. (The name "Leon Chaim Bach" is an anagram
Anagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of "Michael Chabon," as is "Malachi B. Cohen," the name of a fictional comics expert who wrote occasional essays about the Escapist for the character's Dark Horse Comic series.) In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn." The first recipient of the prize was Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts (author)
Jason Roberts is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for the bestselling A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler , a biography of James Holman, the blind adventurer of the early 19th century...
, whose winning story, "7C", was then included in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Chabon.
A scene in the film adaptation of Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh shows two characters in a bookstore stocking August Van Zorn books.
The Chabon universe
Chabon has provided several subtle hints throughout his work that the stories he tells take place in a shared fictional universe. One recurring character, who is mentioned in three of Chabon's books but never actually appears, is Eli Drinkwater, a fictional catcherCatcher
Catcher is a position for a baseball or softball player. When a batter takes his turn to hit, the catcher crouches behind home plate, in front of the umpire, and receives the ball from the pitcher. This is a catcher's primary duty, but he is also called upon to master many other skills in order to...
for the Pittsburgh Pirates
Pittsburgh Pirates
The Pittsburgh Pirates are a Major League Baseball club based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They play in the Central Division of the National League, and are five-time World Series Champions...
who died abruptly after crashing his car on Mt. Nebo Road. The most detailed exposition of Drinkwater's life appears in Chabon's 1990 short story "Smoke," which is set at Drinkwater's funeral, and refers to him as "a scholarly catcher, a redoubtable batsman, and a kind, affectionate person." Drinkwater was again referred to (though not by name) in Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys, in which narrator Grady Tripp explains that his sportswriter friend Happy Blackmore was hired "to ghost the autobiography of a catcher, a rising star who played for Pittsburgh and hit the sort of home runs that linger in the memory for years." Tripp explains that Blackmore turned in an inadequate draft, his book contract was cancelled, and the catcher died shortly afterwards, "leaving nothing in Happy's notorious 'files' but the fragments and scribblings of a ghost." In Chabon's children's book Summerland (2002), it is suggested that Blackmore was eventually able to find a publisher for the biography; the character Jennifer T. mentions that she has read a book called Eli Drinkwater: A Life in Baseball, written by Happy Blackmore. Drinkwater's name may have been selected in homage to contemporary author John Crowley
John Crowley
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer...
, whom Chabon is on the record as admiring. Crowley's novel Little, Big
Little, Big
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament is a modern fantasy novel by John Crowley, published in 1981. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1982.-Plot synopsis:...
featured a main character named Alice Drinkwater.
There are also instances in which character surnames reappear from story to story. Cleveland Arning, a character in Chabon's 1988 debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, is described as having come from a wealthy family, one that might be expected to be able to endow
Financial endowment
A financial endowment is a transfer of money or property donated to an institution. The total value of an institution's investments is often referred to as the institution's endowment and is typically organized as a public charity, private foundation, or trust....
a building. Near the end of Wonder Boys (1995), it is mentioned that, on the unnamed college campus at which Grady Tripp teaches, there is a building called Arning Hall "where the English faculty kept office hours." Similarly, in Chabon’s 1989 short story "A Model World," a character named Levine discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for "nephokinesis" (or cloud control) that wins him respect and prominence in the meteorological
Meteorology
Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere. Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the 18th century. The 19th century saw breakthroughs occur after observing networks developed across several countries...
field. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a passing reference is made to the "massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology," ostensibly a building owned by New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
.
Experiences with Hollywood
Although Michael Chabon has described his attitude toward Hollywood as "pre-emptive cynicism," for years the author has nevertheless engaged in sustained, and often fruitless, efforts to bring both adapted and original projects to the screen. In 1994, Chabon pitched a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Host to producer Scott RudinScott Rudin
Scott Rudin is an American film producer and a theatrical producer.-Early life and work:Scott Rudin was born in New York City, NY, on July 14, 1958, and raised in the town of Baldwin on Long Island. At the age of sixteen, he started working as an assistant to theatre producer Kermit Bloomgarden...
, a romantic comedy "about old Jewish folks on a third-rate cruise ship out of Miami". Rudin bought the project and developed it with Chabon, but it was never filmed, partly due to the release of the similarly themed film Out to Sea
Out to Sea
Out to Sea is a 1997 romantic comedy film starring Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Rue McClanahan, Dyan Cannon and Brent Spiner. The film was directed by Martha Coolidge, with a screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs...
in 1997. In the nineties, Chabon also pitched story ideas for both the
X-Men
X-Men
The X-Men are a superhero team in the . They were created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and first appeared in The X-Men #1...
and the Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four
The Fantastic Four is a fictional superhero team appearing in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The group debuted in The Fantastic Four #1 , which helped to usher in a new level of realism in the medium...
movies, but was rejected.
When Scott Rudin was adapting Wonder Boys for the screen, the author declined an offer to write the screenplay, saying he was too busy writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Directed by Curtis Hanson
Curtis Hanson
Curtis Lee Hanson is an American film director, film producer and screenwriter. His directing work includes The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , L.A...
and starring Michael Douglas
Michael Douglas
Michael Kirk Douglas is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; first as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the...
, Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys (film)
Wonder Boys is a dark comedy film based on the 1995 novel of the same title by Michael Chabon. Directed by Curtis Hanson, it stars Michael Douglas as professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing at an unnamed Pittsburgh university...
was released in 2000 to critical acclaim and financial failure. Having bought the film rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Rudin then asked Chabon to work on that film's screenplay. Although Chabon spent 16 months in 2001 and 2002 working on the novel's film adaptation, the project has been mired in pre-production for years.
Chabon's work, however, remains popular in Hollywood, with Rudin purchasing the film rights to The Yiddish Policemen's Union in 2002, five years before the book would be published. The same year, Miramax bought the rights to Summerland and Tales of Mystery and Imagination (a planned collection of eight genre short stories that Chabon has not yet written), each of which was optioned for a sum in the mid-six figures. Chabon also wrote a draft for 2004's Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man 2 is a 2004 American superhero film directed by Sam Raimi, written by Alvin Sargent and developed by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Michael Chabon. It is the second film in the Spider-Man film franchise based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Spider-Man...
, about a third of which was used in the final film. Soon after Spider-Man 2 was released, director Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi
Samuel Marshall "Sam" Raimi is an American film director, producer, actor and writer. He is best known for directing cult horror films like the Evil Dead series, Darkman and Drag Me to Hell, as well as the blockbuster Spider-Man films and the producer of the successful TV series Hercules: The...
mentioned that he hoped to hire Chabon to work on the film's sequel, "if I can get him," but Chabon never worked on Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3 is a 2007 American superhero film written and directed by Sam Raimi, with a screenplay by Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. It is the third film in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Spider-Man...
.
In October 2004, it was announced that Chabon was at work writing Disney's Snow and the Seven, a live-action martial arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film based on Snow White, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. It was the first full-length cel-animated feature in motion picture history, as well as the first animated feature film produced in America, the first produced in full...
to be directed by master Hong Kong fight choreographer and director Yuen Wo Ping. In August 2006, Chabon said that he had been replaced on Snow, sarcastically explaining that the producers wanted to go in "more of a fun direction."
Although Chabon is uninvolved with the project, director Rawson Marshall Thurber
Rawson Marshall Thurber
Rawson Marshall Thurber is an American writer and director of films and commercials.In 2002, he wrote and directed the original Terry Tate: Office Linebacker commercials for Reebok. In 2004, he wrote and directed the hit comedy film, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.In January 2006, he signed on...
shot a film adaptation
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (film)
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a film based on Michael Chabon's best-selling novel of the same name, which was published in 1988. The screenplay was written by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also directed. It was Produced by Michael London and Executive Produced by Omar Amanat. Shooting in...
of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in fall 2006. The film, which stars Sienna Miller
Sienna Miller
Sienna Rose Diana Miller is a British-American actress, model, and fashion designer, best known for her roles in Layer Cake, Alfie, Factory Girl, The Edge of Love and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In 2007, the London Film Criticsnamed her British Actress of the Year for Interview...
and Peter Sarsgaard
Peter Sarsgaard
John Peter Sarsgaard is an American film and stage actor. He landed his first feature role in the movie Dead Man Walking in 1995. He then appeared in the 1998 independent films Another Day in Paradise and Desert Blue. That same year, Sarsgaard received a substantial role in The Man in the Iron...
, was released in April 2008. In February 2008, Scott Rudin reported that a film adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union was in pre-production, to be written and directed by the Coen brothers
Coen Brothers
Joel David Coen and Ethan Jesse Coen known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers...
.
In April 2009, Chabon confirmed he had been hired to do revisions to the script for Disney's
John Carter of Mars
John Carter of Mars (film)
John Carter is a 2012 American epic science fiction film featuring John Carter, the heroic protagonist of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 11-volume Barsoom series. In the film, former Confederate captain John Carter is transported to Mars...
.
Novels
- The Mysteries of PittsburghThe Mysteries of PittsburghThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 1988 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The story is a coming-of-age tale set during the early 1980s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....
(1988) - Wonder BoysWonder BoysWonder Boys is a 1995 novel by the American writer Michael Chabon. It was adapted into a film in 2000.-Plot summary:Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is working on an unwieldy 2,611 page manuscript that is meant to be the follow-up to his successful, award-winning novel The Land...
(1995) - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins before, during, and after World War II. They are a Czech artist named Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born...
(2000) - The Final Solution (2004)
- The Yiddish Policemen's UnionThe Yiddish Policemen's UnionThe Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in...
(2007) - Gentlemen of the RoadGentlemen of the RoadGentlemen of the Road is a 2007 serial novel by American author Michael Chabon. It is a "swashbuckling adventure" set in the kaganate of Khazaria around AD 950...
(2007) - Telegraph Avenue (2011?)
Short story collections
- A Model World and Other StoriesA Model World and Other StoriesA Model World and Other Stories is a 1991 collection of short stories by Michael Chabon. It was his first story collection and second book, following the 1988 novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.-Table of Contents:*Part I: A Model World...
(1991) - Werewolves in Their YouthWerewolves In Their YouthWerewolves in Their Youth is a 1999 collection of short stories by Michael Chabon.-Stories:*"Werewolves in Their Youth"*"House Hunting"*"Son of the Wolfman"*"Green's Book"*"Mrs. Box"*"Spikes"*"The Harris Fetko Story"*"That Was Me"...
(1999)
Essay collections
- Maps and LegendsMaps and LegendsMaps and Legends is an essay collection by American author Michael Chabon that was scheduled for official release on May 1, 2008, although some copies shipped two weeks early from various online bookstores. The book is Chabon's first book-length foray into nonfiction, with 16 essays, some...
(2008) - Manhood for Amateurs (October 2009)
As contributor or editor
- McSweeney'sMcSweeney'sMcSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...
Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (editor and contributor) (2003) - JSA All Stars #7, "The Strange Case of Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil" (writer) (2004)
- McSweeney'sMcSweeney'sMcSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...
Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (editor) (2004) - Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the EscapistThe Escapist (character)The Escapist is a metafictional character, a comic book hero in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, written by Michael Chabon, created as an homage to the heroes of the period known to fans and historians as the Golden Age of Comic Books...
(comic book series published by Dark Horse ComicsDark Horse ComicsDark Horse Comics is the largest independent American comic book and manga publisher.Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon, with the concept of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals. Richardson started out by opening his first comic book...
) (2004–2005) (Numbers 1–8; the first six are also collected in three books, two numbers per volume) - The Best American Short Stories 2005 (editor, with Katrina Kenison) (2005)
- The Escapists (six-issue comic book limited seriesLimited seriesA limited series is a comic book series with a set number of installments. A limited series differs from an ongoing series in that the number of issues is determined before production and it differs from a one shot in that it is composed of multiple issues....
published by Dark Horse Comics) (2006)
External links
- Current official website
- Old official website (defunct as of January 2007; archived circa April 2006) at the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
- The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay, an unofficial but thorough site recommended by Chabon
- Michael Chabon's stories and essays at The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...