Jonathan Franzen Novels

About Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the foremost practitioner of the nineteenth-century social realist novel in contemporary American fiction, a writer who has consistently argued for the capacity of serious literary fiction to illuminate the texture of ordinary life. The Corrections (2001), which won the National Book Award, follows the Lambert family through dysfunction and love in the Midwest; Freedom (2010), which appeared on the cover of Time magazine, expanded his ambitions to include ecology, war, and the meaning of American liberty across three decades. Purity (2015) and the first volume of a planned trilogy, Crossroads (2021), extended his concerns further. Franzen is an essayist as well as a novelist, and his collections How to Be Alone (2002) and Farther Away (2012) illuminate his fiction.