Jennifer Egan | |
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 Egan in 2017 | |
| Born | (1962-09-07)September 7, 1962 (age 62) Chicago,Illinois, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | |
| Genre | |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | |
| www | |
Jennifer Egan (born September 7, 1962) is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel,A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the 2011Pulitzer Prize for Fiction andNational Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president ofPEN America.[1]
After graduating fromKatherine Delmar Burke School andLowell High School, Egan majored in English literature at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. While an undergraduate, she datedSteve Jobs, who installed aMacintosh computer in her bedroom.[2] After graduating, she spent two years atSt John's College, Cambridge, supported by aThouron 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]
Egan has published short fiction in theNew Yorker,Harper's,Zoetrope: All-Story, andPloughshares,[6] among other periodicals, and her journalism appears in theNew York Times Magazine. Her first novel,The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into afilm of the same name released in 2001.[5] She has published one short story collection and six novels, among whichLook at Me was a finalist for theNational Book Award in 2001.
Egan has been hesitant to classifyA Visit from the Goon Squad as either a novel or a short story collection, saying, "I wanted to avoid centrality. I wantedpolyphony. 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 aMicrosoft 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 readingProust. 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]
Egan received aThouron Award in 1986,[4] was the recipient of aNational Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and aGuggenheim 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 theNew York Public Library in 2004–2005.[9] Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from theNational Alliance on Mental Illness.[5] In 2011, she was a finalist for thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[10] That same year, she won theNational Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction),[11] theLos Angeles Times Book Prize,[12] andPulitzer Prize forA Visit from the Goon Squad.[13]
Egan won the 2018Andrew Carnegie Medal forManhattan Beach.[14] The novel was also longlisted for the 2017National Book Award.[15]
Academic literary critics have examined Egan's work in a variety of contexts. David Cowart has read Egan's project inA Visit from the Goon Squad as indebted tomodernist writing but as possessing a closer affinity topostmodernism, in which "she meets the parental postmoderns on their own ground; by the same token, she venerates the grandparental moderns even as she places theirmythography 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 herTwitter 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 societalmimesis", leading him to classify Egan's novels within the history ofmetafiction.[18]
In 2013, the first academic conference event dedicated to Egan's work was held atBirkbeck, University of London, entitled "Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan".[19]
Egan lives inClinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.[20]
