Michael Chabon

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Michael Chabon

Pseudonym(s): Malachi B. Cohen
Born: May 24, 1963
Washington, DC
Occupation(s): Novelist, screenwriter, columnist, short story writer
Nationality: American
Subject(s): Fiction
Website: www.michaelchabon.com

Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author best known for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Chabon grew up in Columbia, Maryland and is of Jewish descent. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

Chabon's parents divorced when he was about eleven years old; consequently, divorce, fatherhood, and single-parenthood would become frequent themes in his writing. Also, many of Chabon's novels contain Jewish characters and address issues of importance to American Jews such as assimilation and anti-Semitism.

Chabon currently lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Ayelet Waldman, who is also an author, and their four children. She is his second wife; he was married briefly to a Seattle woman. He wrote of this first marriage in the anthology I Married My In-Laws (2006).

[edit] Novels and short stories

His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and became a best seller; a movie adaptation, directed and with a screenplay by Rawson Marshall Thurber, is being filmed in Pittsburgh for 2007 release.[1] His subsequent works include Wonder Boys (1995), a novel about a frustrated novelist (based on Chabon's unsuccessful attempt at writing a much larger novel) which was made into a motion picture; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, about an illustrator and a writer in the early comic book industry, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and Summerland (2002), a fantasy novel written for younger readers, which won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 2004, he wrote The Final Solution, a short novel 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 works have been praised for their characterizations and complex use of the English language.

Chabon also has two collections of short stories, both of which came out after his debut novel, entitled Werewolves in their Youth and A Model World. His Dark Horse Comics project The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, a quarterly anthology series, purports to cull stories from an involved, fictitious sixty-year history of the Escapist character created by the protagonists 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.

[edit] Homosexuality as a theme

Early in Chabon's career, some readers and critics mistakenly assumed that he was gay, due to the presence of gay characters in his first three novels. He mentions in the re-issued Mysteries of Pittsburgh that he has had some same-sex relations.[2]

In the past, if interviewers brought up the subject of his sexual orientation, Chabon maintained that he was not gay. After Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Newsweek misidentified him as a gay writer. Chabon later told The New York Times that he was almost happy for the magazine's error. "I feel very lucky about all of that," he told the Times in 2000. "It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one." In a 2002 interview with MetroWeekly, Chabon said on this subject, "...if Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it’s that people can’t be put into categories all that easily."[3]

[edit] Film

Chabon has been writing a film adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, reportedly to be directed by Stephen Daldry, and is at work on Snow and the Seven for Disney, a live-action martial arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be directed by master Hong Kong fight choreographer and director Yuen Wo Ping [4] [5] [6].

Chabon previously pitched story ideas for both the The Fantastic Four[7] and X-Men[8] movies, but was rejected. He also wrote a draft for Spider-Man 2, about a third of which was used in the final film.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Works

[edit] As contributor or editor

[edit] Trivia

  • His name is pronounced, in his words, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Jovi".
  • Starting with Wonder Boys, Chabon provides subtle hints throughout his work that the stories he tells take place in a shared fictional universe. In that novel, one of the buildings on the unnamed college campus where protagonist Grady Tripp teaches is called Arning Hall; the biker antihero of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is Cleveland Arning, described as having come from a wealthy family (that might be expected to be able to endow a building). Also mentioned in that novel, though not by name, is a dead Pittsburgh Pirates catcher very similar to the Eli Drinkwater whose funeral figures in Chabon’s story Smoke. It’s clear that Happy Blackmore, a sportswriter who gives the Ford Galaxie to Grady Tripp as payment for a debt, has written a biography of Drinkwater. Drinkwater makes another appearance, in passing, in Summerland. As one final example, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, mention is made of a “Levine School of Applied Meteorology.” Levine is a main character in Chabon’s story A Model World—he discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for “nephokinesis,” i.e., cloud control.
Michael Chabon (first on left) in a promotional image for Moe'N'a Lisa.
Enlarge
Michael Chabon (first on left) in a promotional image for Moe'N'a Lisa.
  • Chabon has also 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), described by Chabon as "the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century." Van Zorn is both a peripheral character in Chabon's novel Wonder Boys (in which the main characters share a fascination with Van Zorn), and the attributed author of "In The Black Mill", a short story in Chabon's 1999 collection Werewolves in Their Youth. Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn and even given him an equally-fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre, named Leon Chaim Bach. In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies 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.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06223/712694-254.stm (URL accessed 10/06/06)
  2. ^ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18042
  3. ^ Sean Bugg. "Blurring the Lines: Interview with Michael Chabon", MetroWeekly, March 14, 2002.
  4. ^ http://www.michaelchabon.com/works/
  5. ^ http://www.sugarbombs.com/kavalier/current.html
  6. ^ http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000694195
  7. ^ http://www.michaelchabon.com/archives/2005/07/maybe_not_so_mu.html
  8. ^ http://www.michaelchabon.com/archives/2005/03/an_account_of_a.html
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