The Discomfort Zone

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The Discomfort Zone
First edition cover
Author	Jonathan Franzen
Cover artist	Jacket design by Lynn Buckley Jacket art: "Map of a Man's Heart", from McCall's Magazine, January 1960, pp. 32-33. Adapted from nineteenth-century originals by Jo (Lowrey) Leeds and the editors of McCall's.
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date	September 5, 2006
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	195 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-374-29919-6 (first edition, hardback)

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a 2006 memoir by Jonathan Franzen, who received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Corrections in 2001.

According to L´Espresso, The Discomfort Zone reflects the values and contradictions of the American midwest in the 1950s. Franzen holds up Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons as an exemplary representation of life of the American middle class in the author's home town of Webster Groves, Missouri, and countless similar towns. Values such as the love of nature are represented as being related to traditional Protestant values and as becoming less firmly rooted in society because of the waning importance of traditional religious beliefs.^[1]