

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. His parents are Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer. Since 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.Ĭhabon (pronounced, in his words, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi", i.e., / ˈ ʃ eɪ b ɒ n/) was born in Washington, D.C., to a Jewish family. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. 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.Ĭhabon'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. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. 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. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.Ĭhabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984.

Michael Chabon ( / ˈ ʃ eɪ b ɒ n/ SHAY-bon īorn May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer.
