Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American novelist and essayist known for his elegant deployment of figurative language and adventurous experiments with genre conceits. His narratives are frequently suffused with references to world mythology and to his own Jewish heritage.

Chabon was the elder of two children. His father, who was a pediatrician and hospital administrator, and mother, who became a lawyer following the couple’s 1975 divorce, moved the family to the ostensibly utopian planned community of Columbia, Maryland, in 1969. Though Columbia later became the second largest city in Maryland, the town had been occupied for only two years when he arrived, and the young Chabon spent hours exploring the nascent metropolis. Following high school, he enrolled briefly at Carnegie Mellon University (1980–81) before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1984. He then attended the University of California, Irvine, receiving a master’s degree in English in 1987.

Chabon’s adviser submitted his master’s thesis, a work of fiction, to a New York publisher without his knowledge. The volume, which related the sexual awakenings and existential meanderings of a gangster’s son during his first summer out of college, earned Chabon a record advance and was published as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988; film 2008). Because of Chabon’s refusal to euphemize the protagonist’s homosexual experiences, he attracted a substantial gay following. A Model World and Other Stories (1991) was a compilation of some of his short fiction. His next novel, Wonder Boys (1995; film 2000), centres on a weekend in the life of a stymied creative writing professor as he wrangles with his various personal and professional failures. Chabon conceived the novel on the heels of his own inability to refine the massive manuscript that he had originally intended as his sophomore effort.

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Another short-story collection, Werewolves in Their Youth (1999), assembled pieces originally published in magazines such as The New Yorker and GQ. Chabon’s third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), was the sprawling tale of two Jewish cousins who, at the cusp of the comic book phenomenon that began in the mid-1930s, devise a superhero and shepherd him to fame in the pages of their own serial. In conveying the vagaries along their path to eventual happiness, Chabon liberally larded the tale with mythological references. The golem of Prague was central among them, serving as a metaphor for both rebirth and the process of generating a fictional character. The novel earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He followed with Summerland (2002), an expansive young adult novel that features a hero who must save his father (and the world) from the apocalypse by winning a game of baseball against a cast of tricksters drawn from American folklore.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), which speculatively situated the Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska, rather than Israel, deployed hard-boiled detective novel conventions in relating the resolution of a murder. The novel won a Hugo Award in 2008. Gentlemen of the Road (2007), a picaresque featuring medieval Jewish brigands, was serialized in The New York Times and then published as a novel. Chabon also penned the children’s book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man (2011). He scrutinized the consequences of corporate domination and examined American race relations in the novel Telegraph Avenue (2012), which centres on the denizens of a small jazz and soul record shop threatened by the imminent incursion of a rival chain store. The critically acclaimed Moonglow (2016) was inspired by Chabon’s conversations with his dying grandfather.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (2008) and Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009) were collections of essays ruminating on his obsession with the intersections of fiction genres and on domestic life, respectively. In Pops (2018) he further explored fatherhood. Chabon also ventured into screenwriting, penning a draft of the script for Spider-Man 2 and collaborating on the script for John Carter (2012), adapted from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

Chabon was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

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