Jennifer Egan (born September 7, 1962) is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel, '' A Visit from the Goon Squad,'' won the 2011

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, published during ...

and

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".PEN America PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), founded in 1922, and headquartered in New York City, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide th ...

Early life

After graduating from Katherine Delmar Burke School and Lowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. While an undergraduate, she dated

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

, who installed a

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computer in her bedroom. After graduating, she spent two years at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

, supported by a Thouron Award, where she earned an M.A. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write.

Career

Jennifer-egan litteratureXchange-2019 DSC00816

Egan has published short fiction in the ''

New Yorker New Yorker may refer to: * A resident of New York: ** A resident of New York City and its suburbs *** List of people from New York City ** A resident of the New York (state), State of New York *** Demographics of New York (state) * ''The New Yor ...

'', ''

Harper's ''Harper's Magazine'' is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. Launched in New York City in June 1850, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. ''Harper's Magazine'' has ...

'', '' Zoetrope: All-Story'', and '' Ploughshares'', among other periodicals, and her journalism appears in the ''

New York Times Magazine ''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. The magazin ...

''. Her first novel, '' The Invisible Circus'', was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001. She has published one short story collection and six novels, among which '' Look at Me'' was a finalist for the

National Book Award The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. ...

in 2001. Egan has been hesitant to classify ''A Visit from the Goon Squad'' as either a novel or a short story collection, saying, "I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted

polyphony Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice ( monophony) or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chord ...

. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule, later; if you make a rule, then you also should break it!" The book features genre-bending content, such as a chapter entirely formatted as a

Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, developed by Microsoft. It was originally created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially ...

presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said, "I don't experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexistOne thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading

Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( ; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel (in French language, French – translated in English as ''Remembrance of Things Pas ...

. He tries, very successfully, in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose."

Awards

Egan received a Thouron Award in 1986, was the recipient of a

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...

Fellowship, and a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

in 1996. In 2002, she wrote a cover story on homeless children that received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award. She was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second-largest public library in the United States behind the Library of Congress a ...

in 2004–2005. Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the

National Alliance on Mental Illness The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is a United States–based nonprofit organization originally founded as a grassroots group by family members of people diagnosed with mental illness. NAMI identifies its mission as "providing advoca ...

. In 2011, she was a finalist for the

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year's best works of fiction by living Americans, Green Card holders or permanent residents. The winner receives US$15,000 and each of ...

. That same year, she won the

Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...

for ''A Visit from the Goon Squad''. Egan won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for '' Manhattan Beach''. The novel was also longlisted for the 2017

Reception

Academic literary critics have examined Egan's work in a variety of contexts. David Cowart has read Egan's project in ''A Visit from the Goon Squad'' as indebted to

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

writing but as possessing a closer affinity to

postmodernism Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, Culture, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting ...

, in which "she meets the parental postmoderns on their own ground; by the same token, she venerates the grandparental moderns even as she places their

mythography Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true. Instead, the ...

under erasure and dismantles their supreme fictions," an aspect also touched upon by Adam Kelly. Baoyu Nie has focused, alternatively, on the ways in which "Egan draws the reader into the addressee role" through the use of second-person narrative technique in her

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

fiction. Finally, Martin Paul Eve has argued that the university itself is given "quantifiably more space within Egan's work than would be merited under strict societal

mimesis Mimesis (; , ''mīmēsis'') is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including '' imitatio'', imitation, similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of ...

", leading him to classify Egan's novels within the history of

metafiction Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story ...

. In 2013, the first academic conference event dedicated to Egan's work was held at

Birkbeck, University of London Birkbeck, University of London (formally Birkbeck College, University of London), is a Public university, public research university located in London, England, and a constituent college, member institution of the University of London. Establ ...

, entitled "Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan".

Personal life

Egan lives in

Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Clinton Hill is a neighborhood in north-central Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. It is bordered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Flushing Avenue to the north, Williamsburg to the northeast, Classon Avenue and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the ea ...

with her husband and two sons.

Bibliography

Novels

* ''The Invisible Circus'' (1994) * '' Look at Me'' (2001) * '' The Keep'' (2006) * '' A Visit from the Goon Squad'' (2010) * '' Manhattan Beach'' (2017) * '' The Candy House'' (2022)

Short fiction (partial list)

* ''

Emerald City The Emerald City (sometimes called the City of Emeralds) is the capital city of the fictional Land of Oz in L. Frank Baum's ''Oz'' books, first described in '' The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' (1900). Fictional description Located in the center of ...

'' (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996) * "

Black Box In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The te ...

" (short story; 2012, US; released on ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

''s

account)

References

External links

Jennifer Egan's website
* *

Interview. ''The New York Times'', 2017.
Reviews & Scores for ''The Keep''
at Metacritic.com

at This Old House website
Reading report from Happy Endings
with Peter Behrens and David Rakoff, published at bookishlove.net (Nov 2006)
2010 ''BOMB Magazine'' interview with Jennifer Egan by Heidi Julavits
*Paul Vidich (Spring 2010)
"Jennifer Egan, An Interview"
'' Narrative Magazine''.
Jennifer Egan: Chronological Bibliography of First Editions
{{DEFAULTSORT:Egan, Jennifer Living people 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American short story writers 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American novelists 21st-century American short story writers 21st-century American women writers Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge American women novelists American women short story writers Lowell High School (San Francisco) alumni National Endowment for the Arts Fellows PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners People from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners University of Pennsylvania alumni Writers from Brooklyn Novelists from New York City Novelists from Chicago Novelists from San Francisco 1962 births National Book Critics Circle Award winners