Novelist, short story writer
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
and
National Book Critics Circle Award
for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president of
PEN America
.
[1]
Early life
[
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]
After graduating from
Katherine Delmar Burke School
and
Lowell High School
, Egan majored in English literature at the
University of Pennsylvania
. While an undergraduate, she dated
Steve Jobs
, who installed a
Macintosh
computer in her bedroom.
[2]
After graduating, she spent two years at
St John's College, Cambridge
, supported by a
Thouron Award
, where she earned an M.A.
[3]
[4]
She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write.
[5]
Career
[
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]
Egan has published short fiction in the
New Yorker
,
Harper's
,
Zoetrope: All-Story
, and
Ploughshares
,
[6]
among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in the
New York Times Magazine
. Her first novel,
The Invisible Circus
, was released in 1995 and adapted into a
film of the same name
released in 2001.
[5]
She has published one short story collection and six novels, among which
Look at Me
was a finalist for the
National Book Award
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
. 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
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 coexist
... One 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
. 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."
[7]
Awards
[
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]
Egan received a
Thouron Award
in 1986,
[4]
was the recipient of a
National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship
in 1996.
[8]
In 2002 she wrote a cover story on homeless children that received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award.
[5]
She was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the
New York Public Library
in 2004?2005.
[9]
Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the
National Alliance on Mental Illness
.
[5]
In 2011 she was a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
.
[10]
That same year she won the
National Book Critics Circle Award
(Fiction),
[11]
the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize
,
[12]
and
Pulitzer Prize
for
A Visit from the Goon Squad
.
[13]
Egan won the 2018
Andrew Carnegie Medal
for
Manhattan Beach
.
[14]
The novel was also longlisted for the 2017
National Book Award
.
[15]
Reception
[
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]
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
writing but as possessing a closer affinity to
postmodernism
, 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
under erasure and dismantles their supreme fictions,"
[
clarification needed
]
an aspect also touched upon by Adam Kelly.
[16]
[17]
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
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
", leading him to classify Egan's novels within the history of
metafiction
.
[18]
In 2013, the first academic conference event dedicated to Egan's work was held at
Birkbeck, University of London
, entitled "Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan".
[19]
Personal life
[
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]
Egan lives in
Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
with her husband and two sons.
[20]
Bibliography
[
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]
Novels
[
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]
Short fiction (partial list)
[
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]
References
[
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]
- ^
"Jennifer Egan bio"
.
PEN AMERICA
. Retrieved
February 26,
2024
.
- ^
Schuessler, Jennifer (November 3, 2010).
"Inside the List"
.
The New York Times
. Retrieved
October 3,
2012
.
- ^
Mitchell, Margaret (2009), Hamilton, Geoff; Jones, Brian (eds.),
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work
, Infobase Publishing, pp. 108?110,
ISBN
978-0-8160-7578-2
- ^
a
b
Whiteman, Sean (July?August 2011).
"Surprises Are Always The Best"
.
The Pennsylvania Gazette
.
109
(6).
- ^
a
b
c
d
"Amazon.com: Jennifer Egan: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle"
.
www.amazon.com
. Retrieved
April 25,
2018
.
- ^
"Author Details"
.
Pshares.org
. Retrieved
April 20,
2011
.
- ^
Julavits, Heidi.
"Jennifer Egan"
Archived
October 16, 2012, at the
Wayback Machine
,
BOMB Magazine
, Summer 2010. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
- ^
"Jennifer Egan"
.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
. Archived from
the original
on May 11, 2011.
- ^
"Past Fellows"
.
New York Public Library
.
- ^
Bosman, Julie (March 15, 2011).
"Deborah Eisenberg Wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction"
.
The New York Times
.
- ^
Bosman, Julie (March 11, 2011).
"Jennifer Egan and Isabel Wilkerson Win National Book Critics Circle Awards"
.
The New York Times
.
- ^
"Jennifer Egan ? Novelist and Journalist"
.
jenniferegan.com
. Retrieved
April 25,
2018
.
- ^
Discussion of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" in relation to her work as a whole:
Retrieved 20 April 2011.
- ^
"Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction"
.
American Library Association
. Retrieved
March 10,
2018
.
- ^
"2017 National Book Award Longlist, Fiction:
Manhattan Beach
"
. National Book Foundation
. Retrieved
April 13,
2018
.
- ^
Cowart, David (May 27, 2015). "Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad".
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
.
56
(3): 252 in 241?254.
doi
:
10.1080/00111619.2014.905448
.
ISSN
0011-1619
.
S2CID
162555558
.
- ^
Kelly, Adam (September 21, 2011). "Beginning with Postmodernism".
Twentieth-Century Literature
.
57
(3?4): 391?422.
doi
:
10.1215/0041462X-2011-4009
.
ISSN
0041-462X
.
- ^
Eve, Martin Paul (2015).
"
"Structural Dissatisfaction": Academics on Safari in the Novels of Jennifer Egan"
.
Open Library of Humanities
.
1
(1).
doi
:
10.16995/olh.29
.
- ^
"Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan ? Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London"
.
www.bbk.ac.uk
. Archived from
the original
on March 5, 2016
. Retrieved
January 2,
2016
.
- ^
Cooke, Rachel (September 24, 2017).
"Jennifer Egan: 'I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap'
"
.
The Guardian
. Retrieved
April 25,
2018
.
- ^
Eve, Martin Paul (2020).
"Textual Scholarship and Contemporary Literary Studies: Jennifer Egan's Editorial Processes and the Archival Edition of Emerald City"
.
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory
.
31
(1): 25?41.
doi
:
10.1080/10436928.2020.1709713
.
Further reading
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]
External links
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