Jonathan Franzen

Winner of the National Book Award for The Corrections (2001), Jonathan Franzen is also known as the guy who snubbed Oprah Winfrey's television book club. A graduate of Swarthmore College (1981), Franzen began publishing novels in the late 1980s. The Corrections, his third novel, was getting good reviews and selling well when Oprah Winfrey announced that she had selected it as her "book of the month." Franzen's response was less than enthusiastic, and Oprah fans were insulted by what they perceived as arrogance. Franzen was publicly contrite and in the end the to-do earned him and his book publicity far beyond literary circles. Since The Corrections he has published a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), contributed to The New Yorker magazine and released a memoir of adolescence, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2007).