Jonathan Franzen ─ The comedy of rage

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and a private interview (along with published ones), Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and his art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel,Purity.

Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels on which his reputation rests?

Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop-culture as one ofthe literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences-but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.

Philip Weinstein is the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, USA. The recipient of several NEH Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship, and past President of the Faulkner Society, Weinstein has written books that range from James to Faulkner and Morrison (in American literature), and from Dickens through Joyce (in British literature). These includeFaulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996),Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (2005). Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner(2010) was the recipient of the Hugh Holman Award for the best book written on Southern Literature. He is also the editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995).