Michael Chabon was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C. and raised mostly in Columbia, a planned city with utopian aspirations in the Maryland tobacco country. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, and has spent most of the past two decades in California, with brief sojourns in Washington State, Florida, and New York State. Since 1997, he has been living with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their children, in Berkeley.
Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was originally written for his master’s thesis at U.C. Irvine and became a New York Times bestseller. Chabon’s second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was also a bestseller, and was made into a critically-acclaimed film featuring actors Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. Michael Chabon believes that three things are required for success as a novelist: talent, luck, and discipline. As he says, “Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” Chabon’s hope and trust certainly paid off.
Random House published his third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in September 2000. Chabon is also the author of two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories (1990) and Werewolves In Their Youth (1999). His first young adult novel, Summerland, was published in 2002 by Talk Miramax Books and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. He has also written articles and essays, a number of screenplays and teleplays (as well as sharing story credit for Spiderman 2), and edited The Best American Short Stories 2005. Chabon’s story "Son of the Wolfman" was chosen for the 1999 O. Henry collection and for a National Magazine Award.The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was selected by the American Library Association as one of the Notable Books of 2000 and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It won the New York Society Library Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize. Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004) was awarded the 2005 National Jewish Book Award and also the 2003 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review. Michael Chabon also writes a regular column for the magazine Details.
Michael Chabon has lectured widely on topics including the art and craft of writing, the tradition of Jewish fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name but a very few. He has appeared before audiences all over the United States and in Russia, Finland, Lithuania, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany and Canada. He has spoken to the creative teams at Pixar Animation Studios about fantasy and childhood, to the employees of Industrial Light and Magic about the art of storytelling, and to many different literary, Jewish, and corporate organizations about a wide variety of topics.
Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is a hardboiled detective novel set in an alternate world where Israel failed to be born and millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska , creating a miniature American Yiddishland. It became a New York Times bestseller immediately upon publication and was nominated for both an Edgar Award and a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2008. In November 2007, his short swashbuckling adventure novel, Gentlemen of the Road, serialized in fifteen chapters in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, was published by Del Rey. Michael Chabon’s collection of essays entitled Maps & Legends will be published by McSweeney’s in March 2008.
(read less)Michael Chabon was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C. and raised mostly in Columbia, a planned city with utopian aspirations in the Maryland tobacco country. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, and has spent most of the past two decades in California, with brief sojourns in Washington State, Florida, and New York State. Since 1997, he has been living with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their...
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