92-487: Stephen Chbosky ( / ʃ ə ˈ b ɒ s k i / ; born January 25, 1970) is an American film director, screenwriter, and author. He is best-known for writing the bestselling coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), as well as for writing and directing the 2012 film adaptation of the book. Most recently, he directed the 2017 drama Wonder and the 2021 film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen . His first psychological horror novel, Imaginary Friend ,
184-471: A Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine . Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus . It received
276-462: A Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , 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, though most first-time novelists receive advances under $ 7,500. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and
368-526: A bildungsroman ( German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn] , plural bildungsromane , German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːnə] ) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood ( coming of age ), in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ('education', alternatively 'forming') and Roman ('novel'). The term
460-450: 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 2014, Amazon.com , a leading book distributor, was in a dispute with Hachette , a publisher. Hundreds of authors, Chabon included, condemned Amazon in an open letter because Amazon stopped taking pre-orders for books published by Hachette. After the publication of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , Chabon
552-559: A TV series pilot that Chabon was asked to write in 1999, is a social novel set on the borders between Oakland and Berkeley in the summer of 2004 that sees a "large cast of characters grapple with infidelity, fatherhood, crooked politicians, racism, nostalgia and buried secrets." Chabon said upon publication in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that the novel concerns "the possibility and impossibility of creating shared community spaces that attempt to transcend
644-607: A book-length work of non-fiction called Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son , was 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 ,
736-625: A bookstore stocking August Van Zorn books. 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 catcher 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
828-506: 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",
920-535: 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 . In 2014, Chabon was involved in writing lyrics for Mark Ronson 's album Uptown Special . In an interview with WCBN-FM , Chabon described meeting Ronson at
1012-598: 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 . During a 2007 interview with the Washington Post , Chabon discussed his second book under the contract, saying, "I would like it to be set in the present day and feel right now
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#17327834415451104-567: 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
1196-608: A collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in The New Yorker . After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , Chabon spent five years working on a second novel, Fountain City , a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida." It ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, "never felt like I
1288-429: 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." Chabon
1380-560: A film adaptation of Michael Chabon 's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , though the project fell apart by August 2000. Chbosky wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film adaptation of the Broadway rock musical Rent , which received mixed reviews. In late 2005, Chbosky said that he was writing a film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower . In the mid-2000s, Chbosky decided, on the advice of his agent, to begin looking for work in television in addition to film. Finding he "enjoyed
1472-610: A fundraiser for MacDowell , to which Chabon is contributing all royalties. In an interview with the American Booksellers Association promoting Moonglow in November 2016, Chabon stated that his next fiction project would be "...a long overdue follow-up—but not a sequel—to Summerland , my book for a somewhat younger readership. It's something I've been trying to get around to for a long time." Despite his success, Chabon continues to perceive himself as
1564-482: A good blend of the classics, horror, and fantasy." He was heavily influenced by J. D. Salinger 's novel The Catcher in the Rye and the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams . Chbosky graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1988, around which time he met Stewart Stern , screenwriter of the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause . Stern became Chbosky's "good friend and mentor", and proved
1656-414: 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, he 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 he
1748-431: A little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie." He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings. Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh , where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine , where he received
1840-420: 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, he published A Model World ,
1932-407: A main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist , and they are ultimately accepted into society—the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity. Franco Moretti "argues that the main conflict in the bildungsroman
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#17327834415452024-547: A major influence on Chbosky's career. In 1992, Chbosky graduated from the University of Southern California 's Filmic Writing, screenwriting program. He wrote, directed, and acted in the 1995 independent film The Four Corners of Nowhere , which gained Chbosky his first agent. It also was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival , and became one of the first films shown on the Sundance Channel . In
2116-441: 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
2208-548: A party, and later being contacted to write a song. Chabon penned "Crack in the Pearl", and after growing chemistry with Ronson and Jeff Bhasker , worked on more songs for the album. One of these included the single "Daffodils", which he wrote with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala . In total, Chabon helped write 9 of the 11 songs on the album, not including mega-smash hit, " Uptown Funk ". He has also collaborated with Adam Schlesinger on
2300-479: A public lecture and reading of the novel in Oakland, California, Chabon listed creative influences as broad as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , Robert Altman , and William Faulkner . Chabon's latest novel, Moonglow , was published November 22, 2016. The novel is a quasi-metafictional memoir, based upon the deathbed confessions of Chabon's grandfather in the late 1980s. Chabon followed-up Moonglow in summer 2017 with
2392-538: 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,
2484-434: A rash youth, making rash decisions which cost dearly to himself and all around him. (...) The story reaches its conclusion when Achilles has reached maturity and allows King Priam to recover Hector's body". The genre translates fairly directly into the cinematic form, the coming-of-age film . A bildungsroman is a growing up or "coming of age" of a generally naive person who goes in search of answers to life's questions with
2576-487: A tendency toward melodrama, trying to end it all." He began writing, and within a couple of days had written 50 pages of what became 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. He 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,
2668-504: Is a significant "unification" of his earlier and later styles, declaring in an interview, "I could do whatever I wanted to do in this book and it would be OK even if it verged on crime fiction, even if it verged on magic realism, even if it verged on martial arts fiction.... I was open to all of that and yet I didn't have to repudiate or steer away from the naturalistic story about two families living their everyday lives and coping with pregnancy and birth and adultery and business failure and all
2760-497: Is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling, while a Künstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self. Furthermore, some memoirs and published journals can be regarded as bildungsroman although claiming to be predominantly factual (e.g. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac or The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara ). The term
2852-548: 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." In 1987, Chabon married
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2944-519: Is also more loosely used to describe coming-of-age films and related works in other genres. Michael Chabon Michael Chabon ( / ˈ ʃ eɪ b ɒ n / SHAY -bon ; born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C. , he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh , graduating in 1984. He subsequently received
3036-561: Is literature in mid-transformation.... [T]he 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
3128-408: 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
3220-535: 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
3312-407: Is the myth of modernity with its overvaluation of youth and progress as it clashes with the static teleological vision of happiness and reconciliation found in the endings of Goethe 's Wilhelm Meister and even Jane Austen 's Pride and Prejudice ". There are many variations and subgenres of bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual. An Entwicklungsroman ('development novel')
3404-464: 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
3496-465: The 2021 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2021 as its Opening Night Gala Presentation, and was released in theaters on September 24, 2021. In October 2019, Chbosky's second novel, Imaginary Friend , debuted as a Top 10 New York Times Best Seller. Chbosky currently resides in Los Angeles, California. Film Television Bildungsroman In literary criticism ,
3588-569: The American Library Association 's 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2022 and 2023 lists of the 10 most frequently challenged books. In July 2013, The Perks of Being a Wallflower had spent over a year on the New York Times Bestseller list, and was published in 31 languages. In 2000, Chbosky edited Pieces , an anthology of short stories. The same year, he worked with director Jon Sherman on
3680-588: The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union , an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo , Sidewise , Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue , billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch ", concerning
3772-420: The film adaptation of Steven Levenson and Pasek & Paul 's Tony Award -winning musical, Dear Evan Hansen . On June 11, 2020, he was officially confirmed to direct the film. It stars Ben Platt in the title role , which he originated on Broadway, along with Kaitlyn Dever , Amandla Stenberg , Nik Dodani , Colton Ryan , Amy Adams , Danny Pino and Julianne Moore . The film had its world premiere at
Stephen Chbosky - Misplaced Pages Continue
3864-540: The "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks toward 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 a 2012 interview with Guy Raz of Weekend All Things Considered , Chabon said that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words
3956-646: 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",
4048-431: 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." In 2002, Chabon published Summerland , a fantasy novel written for younger readers that received mixed reviews but sold extremely well, and won
4140-458: 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
4232-467: The 2017 live action reboot of Disney's Beauty and the Beast , directed by Bill Condon and starring Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast. Chbosky and Watson developed a close relationship during the production of The Perks of Being a Wallflower . The adaptation was faithful to the original 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast , with all the original musical numbers included. The film
4324-521: 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
4416-517: 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
4508-800: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2010, having written an op-ed piece for the New York Times in June 2010 in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botching of the Gaza flotilla raid and the explanations that followed. Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces was published in May 2018. Pops is a short non-fiction memoir/essay collection,
4600-478: The United States than if he said he was going to take them all out to be shot. He's like a random impulse generator." In a 2017 radio interview, Chabon spoke of Trump: "Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he's going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of
4692-816: The White House on a gurney." 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 fiction and plot. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & 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
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#17327834415454784-618: The bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795–96, or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland 's Geschichte des Agathon of 1767. Although the bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle 's English translation of Goethe's novel (1824) and his own Sartor Resartus (1833–34),
4876-453: The decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it." 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
4968-414: The detective story, "a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer," but adds that "... Chabon makes good on his claim: a successful detective story need not be lacking in literary merit." 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
5060-550: The edited collection Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation , a non-fiction collection of essays by writers concerning the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, featuring contributions from writers including Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Geraldine Brooks. Chabon co-edited the volume with Ayelet Waldman, and they both contributed essays to the collection. Chabon had previously weighed in on
5152-527: The essays thematically linked by the rewards and challenges of various aspects of fatherhood and family. Chabon's next non-fiction book, Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros , was published in January 2019. This volume is a collections of introductions, afterwords, and liner notes that Chabon has contributed over the years to various books and other projects, also exploring Chabon's own literary influences and ideas about writing and reading. The book serves as
5244-440: The expectation that these will result in gaining experience of the world. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest child going out in the world to seek their fortune. Usually in the beginning of the story, there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on their journey. In a bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features
5336-585: The film The Perks of Being a Wallflower , based on his novel. Production took place in mid-2011, and the film was released in fall 2012. The film starred Logan Lerman , Emma Watson and Ezra Miller . Chbosky was nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for the 2013 Writers Guild Awards , and the film won the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature, as well as the 2013 People's Choice Award for Best Dramatic Movie. Chbosky re-wrote Evan Spiliotopoulos original script for
5428-508: The first English bildungsroman, inspired many British novelists. In the 20th century, it spread to France and several other countries around the globe. Barbara Whitman noted that the Iliad might be the first bildungsroman. It is not just "the story of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is in effect the backdrop for the story of Achilles ' development. At the beginning Achilles is still
5520-400: The issues that might go into making a novel written in the genre of mainstream quote-unquote realistic fiction, that that was another genre for me now and I felt free to mix them all in a sense." The novel has been optioned by film producer Scott Rudin (who previously optioned and produced Wonder Boys ), and Cameron Crowe is adapting the novel into a screenplay, according to Chabon. In
5612-427: The late 1990s, Chbosky wrote several unproduced screenplays, including ones titled Audrey Hepburn's Neck and Schoolhouse Rock . In 1994, Chbosky was working on a "very different type of book" than The Perks of Being a Wallflower when he wrote the line, "I guess that's just one of the perks of being a wallflower." Chbosky recalled that he "wrote that line. And stopped. And realized that somewhere in that [sentence]
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#17327834415455704-403: The late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials . Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. , to a Jewish family. His parents are Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon,
5796-670: The limits imposed on us by our backgrounds, heritage and history." Five years in gestation, Telegraph Avenue had a difficult birth, Chabon telling the Guardian newspaper, "I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop.... I had to start all over again, keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element." After starting out with literary realism with his first two novels and moving into genre-fiction experiments from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay onward, Chabon feels that Telegraph Avenue
5888-461: The main character, and his mother, reflected "me and my mother in a lot of ways". The first season of Jericho had lackluster ratings , and CBS canceled the show in May 2007. A grassroots campaign to revive the series convinced CBS to renew the series for a second season, which premiered on February 12, 2008, before being canceled once more in March 2008. Chbosky wrote the screenplay of and directed
5980-440: The money back?' " "I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead." Chabon has confessed to being "careless and sloppy" when it came to his novels' plots, saying how he "again and again falls back on the same basic story." 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
6072-507: The novel was released 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 . 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,
6164-505: The people [he met who were working] in television", Chbosky agreed to serve as co-creator, executive producer, and writer of the CBS serial television drama Jericho , which premiered in September 2006. The series revolves around the inhabitants of the fictional small town of Jericho, Kansas in the aftermath of several nuclear attacks. Chbosky has said the relationship between Jake Green,
6256-591: The poet Lollie Groth. 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. He married the Israeli -born writer Ayelet Waldman in 1993. They live together in Berkeley , California, with their four children. Chabon has said that
6348-453: The presidency (signing a petition with over 400 other writers against his candidacy in May 2016 ), and during his administration. During an interview with The Guardian before Trump's inauguration in January 2017, Chabon remarked of the incoming president, "I really have no idea what to expect. He's so unpredictable. He's so mercurial. You know, I would be no more surprised if he stood up there and declared amnesty for all illegal immigrants to
6440-495: The same hotel as Vetch, who worked as an English professor at the (nonexistent) Coxley College and wrote hundreds of pulp 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
6532-408: The screen. In 1994, Chabon pitched a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Host to producer Scott Rudin , 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
6624-492: The song "House of Broken Gingerbread" written for the Monkees ' October 2018 album Christmas Party . He also co-wrote "Boxes" for Moses Sumney , and wrote for an unreleased Charlie Puth song. Some of Chabon's musical influences include Steely Dan and Yes . Although Chabon once described his attitude toward Hollywood as "pre-emptive cynicism", for years the author has worked to bring both adapted and original projects to
6716-451: 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
6808-405: 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." The New York Times states that
6900-704: The tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow , a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989. Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity . He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since
6992-470: 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
7084-561: 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 added 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." Telegraph Avenue , adapted from an idea for
7176-487: 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 next 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,
7268-476: Was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, and Columbia , Maryland. Columbia, where he 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
7360-416: Was a bestseller, instantly catapulting Chabon to literary celebrity. Among his 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 he 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
7452-610: Was a commercial and critical success. In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from the unfinished 1,500 page Fountain City manuscript, "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript" written by Chabon, was included in McSweeney's 36 . 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
7544-540: Was a vocal endorser of Barack Obama during his 2008 election campaign, and wrote an enthusiastic opinion piece on Obama for the New York Review of Books , titled "Obama & the Conquest of Denver", in October 2008. Subsequently, Chabon included a brief, fictionalized 'cameo' by Obama in his 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue . Since 2016, Chabon has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump , both during his campaign for
7636-465: 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
7728-409: 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
7820-446: Was coined in 1819 by philologist Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern in his university lectures, and was later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey , who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features. The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical. The birth of
7912-479: Was conceptually on steady ground." At one point, he 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
8004-514: 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 science fiction mavericks such as Avram Davidson and Howard Waldrop . The imperial politics are craftily resonant and
8096-619: Was in many ways different." The book, Chbosky's first novel, was published by Pocket Books in 1999, and was an immediate popular success with teenage readers; by 2000, the novel was MTV Books' best-selling title, and The New York Times noted in 2007 that it had sold more than 700,000 copies and "is passed from adolescent to adolescent like a hot potato". As of May 2013, the number of copies in print reached over two million. Wallflower also stirred up controversy due to Chbosky's portrayal of teen sexuality and drug use . The book has been removed from circulation in several schools and appeared on
8188-453: Was mistakenly featured in a Newsweek article on up-and-coming gay writers ( Pittsburgh ' s 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
8280-407: Was published in October 2019. Chbosky was born in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , and was raised the suburb of Upper St. Clair Township, Pennsylvania . He is the son of Lea (née Meyer), a tax preparer, and Fred G. Chbosky, a steel company executive and consultant to CFOs. Chbosky has a sister, Stacy, who is married to director John Erick Dowdle . He was raised Catholic. As a teenager, Chbosky "enjoyed
8372-399: Was released on March 17, 2017. Chbosky directed the 2017 film Wonder , co-written by Chbosky, Jack Thorne , and Steve Conrad and based on the 2012 novel of the same name by R. J. Palacio. The film starred Julia Roberts , Owen Wilson , and Jacob Tremblay , and was released on November 17, 2017. On November 29, 2018, Universal Pictures announced that Chbosky was in talks to direct
8464-430: Was the kid I was really trying to find." After several years of gestation, Chbosky began researching and writing The Perks of Being a Wallflower , an epistolary novel that follows the intellectual and emotional maturation of a teenager who uses the alias Charlie over the course of his first year of high school. The book is semi-autobiographical; Chbosky has said that he "relate[s] to Charlie[...] But my life in high school
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