Jonathan Franzen was born near Chicago in August, 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College, in 1981, he studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Mr. Franzen is the author of three novels— The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), The Corrections (2001)— a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), and a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006).  His honors include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, and the National Book Award (for The Corrections) in 2001. He writes frequently for The New Yorker, and he lives in New York City.