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Michael Chabon

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Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author best known for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.

Michael Chabon
File:Michaelchabon.jpg
BornMay 24, 1963
Washington, DC
Pen nameMalachi B. Cohen
OccupationNovelist, screenwriter, columnist, short story writer
NationalityAmerican
SubjectFiction
Website
www.michaelchabon.com

Biography

Chabon (pronounced, in his words, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Jovi") grew up in Columbia, Maryland and is of Jewish descent. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

Chabon's parents divorced when he was about eleven years old; consequently, divorce, fatherhood, and single-parenthood would become frequent themes in his writing. Also, many of Chabon's novels contain Jewish characters and address issues of importance to American Jews such as assimilation and anti-Semitism.

Chabon currently lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Ayelet Waldman, who is also an author, and mother of their four children. She is his second wife; he was married briefly to Lollie Groth, a poet, and they divorced in 1991. He wrote of this first marriage in the anthology I Married My In-Laws (2006).

Novels and short stories

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was written as his University of California, Irvine master's thesis, and he received a $155,000 advance for it from his publisher (an impressive sum, considering that most first-time novelists receive advances from $5,000-$7,500.)[1] Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and became a best seller; a movie adaptation, directed and with a screenplay by Rawson Marshall Thurber, is being filmed in Pittsburgh for 2007 release.[2] His subsequent works include Wonder Boys (1995), a novel about a frustrated novelist (based on Chabon's unsuccessful attempt at writing a much larger novel) which was made into a motion picture in 2000; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, about an illustrator and a writer in the early comic book industry, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and Summerland (2002), a fantasy novel written for younger readers, which won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 2004, he wrote The Final Solution, a novella about an investigation led by an unknown old man, whom the reader can guess to be Sherlock Holmes, during the final years of World War II. His works have been praised for their characterizations and complex use of the English language.[citation needed]

Chabon also has published two collections of short stories, both of which came out after his debut novel, entitled Werewolves in their Youth and A Model World. His Dark Horse Comics project The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, a quarterly anthology series, purports to cull stories from an involved, fictitious sixty-year history of the Escapist character created by the protagonists of Kavalier & Clay. It was awarded the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Anthology and a pair of Harvey Awards for Best Anthology and Best New Series.

Chabon is working on a 16-part serialized novel which is scheduled to debut in The New York Times Magazine's Funny Pages on January 28, 2007. The serial, tentatively titled "Jews with Swords," has been described by Chabon as "a swashbuckling adventure story set around the year 1000."[3] In late 2006, the author also completed the final draft of his fifth novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union,[4] which will be published on May 1, 2007.

Homosexuality as a theme

Early in Chabon's career, some readers and critics mistakenly assumed that he was gay, due to the presence of gay characters in his first three novels.

In the past, if interviewers brought up the subject of his sexual orientation, Chabon maintained that he was not gay. After Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Newsweek misidentified him as a gay writer. Chabon later told The New York Times that he was almost happy for the magazine's error. "I feel very lucky about all of that," he told the Times in 2000. "It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one." In a 2002 interview with MetroWeekly, Chabon said of the subject, "...if Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it’s that people can’t be put into categories all that easily."[5]

Chabon has since confirmed that he has had same-sex relationships in the past, following college, in an introduction to the re-issued Mysteries of Pittsburgh.[6]

Interest in Genre Fiction

In a 2002 essay, Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction (including his own), saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."[7] In what seems to be a reaction against these "plotless [stories] sparkling with epiphanic dew," Chabon's post-2000 work has been marked by an increased interest in genre writing and plot. While Kavalier and Clay was, like Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, an essentially realistic, contemporary novel (whose plot happened to revolve around comic-book superheroes), Chabon's subsequent works--such as the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Final Solution, his forays into comic-book writing, and the "swashbuckling adventure" of "Jews with Swords"--have been almost exclusively genre-based.

Chabon's forays into genre writing have met with mixed reactions. (One science-fiction short story by Chabon, "The Martian Agent," was described by a reviewer as "enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker.")[8] While The Village Voice called The Final Solution "ingenious,"[9] The Boston Globe wrote, "[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance."[10] The New York Times allowed that Chabon's novella "delicately fuses the Golden age detective story with a modern narration that's concerned with questions about life and experiences beyond whodunit," but added that the detective story, "a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer."[8]

In 2005, Chabon argued against the idea that genre writing, and entertaining writing, shouldn't appeal to "the real writer," saying that the common perception is that "Entertainment....means junk. [But] maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."[11]

Experiences with Hollywood

Although Michael Chabon has described his attitude toward Hollywood as "pre-emptive cynicism,"[1] for years the author has nevertheless engaged in sustained, and often fruitless, efforts to bring both adapted and original projects to the screen. In 1994, Chabon pitched a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Host to producer Scott Rudin, which Rudin bought but never filmed. In the nineties, Chabon also pitched story ideas for both the The Fantastic Four[12] and X-Men[13] movies, but was rejected.

When Scott Rudin was adapting Chabon's Wonder Boys for the screen, the author declined an offer to write the screenplay, saying he was too busy writing Kavalier and Clay.[1] Having bought the film rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Rudin then asked Chabon to work on that film's screenplay. Although Chabon spent sixteen months from 2001-2002 working on the novel's film adaptation, the project has been mired in pre-production for years.

Chabon's work, however, remains popular in Hollywood, with Rudin purchasing the film rights to Chabon's upcoming novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel in 2002. The same year, Miramax bought the rights to Chabon's Summerland and his Tales of Mystery and Imagination (a short story collection that Chabon has not yet written), each of which were optioned for a sum in the mid-six figures.[1] Chabon also wrote a draft for 2004's Spider-Man 2, about a third of which was used in the final film. Around the time of the film's release, Chabon wrote that "People seem to want to know which parts of the final film, if any, represent my contribution. I always say, 'The ones you liked the best.' That is, of course, a non-answer. As is this."[14] Soon after Spider-Man 2's release, director Sam Raimi mentioned that he hoped to hire Chabon to work on the film's sequel, "if I can get him,"[15] though Chabon would end up not working on Spider-Man 3.

In October 2004, it was announced that Chabon was at work writing Disney's Snow and the Seven, a live-action martial arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be directed by master Hong Kong fight choreographer and director Yuen Wo Ping.[16] In August 2006, Chabon said that he had been replaced on Snow, sarcastically explaining that the producers wanted to go in "more of a fun direction."[4]

Works

Novels

Short story collections

As contributor or editor

Trivia

  • Starting with Wonder Boys, Chabon provides subtle hints throughout his work that the stories he tells take place in a shared fictional universe. In that novel, one of the buildings on the unnamed college campus where protagonist Grady Tripp teaches is called Arning Hall; the biker antihero of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is Cleveland Arning, described as having come from a wealthy family (that might be expected to be able to endow a building). Also mentioned in that novel, though not by name, is a dead Pittsburgh Pirates catcher very similar to the Eli Drinkwater whose funeral figures in Chabon’s story Smoke. It’s clear that Happy Blackmore, a sportswriter who gives the Ford Galaxie to Grady Tripp as payment for a debt, has written a biography of Drinkwater. Drinkwater makes another appearance, in passing, in Summerland. As one final example, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, mention is made of a “Levine School of Applied Meteorology.” Levine is a main character in Chabon’s story A Model World—he discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for “nephokinesis,” i.e., cloud control.
 
Michael Chabon (first on left) in a promotional image for Moe'N'a Lisa.
  • Chabon has forged an unusual horror/fantasy fiction persona, under the name of August Van Zorn. More elaborately developed than a pseudonym, August Van Zorn is purported to be a pen name for one Albert Vetch (1899-1963), described by Chabon as "the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century." Van Zorn is both a peripheral character in Chabon's novel Wonder Boys (in which the main characters share a fascination with Van Zorn), and the attributed author of "In The Black Mill", a short story in Chabon's 1999 collection Werewolves in Their Youth. Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn and even given him an equally-fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre, named Leon Chaim Bach (an anagram of "Michael Chabon," just like "Malachi B. Cohen," the fictional comics expert who chronicles the history of the Escapist). In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn." The first recipient of the prize was Jason Roberts, whose winning story, "7C", was then included in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Chabon.

References

  1. ^ a b c d "TRIP ALONG WRITE PATH: Author struggles for Hollywood ending". by Jeff Gottlieb, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 2002-07-16. Retrieved 2007-01-17. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  2. ^ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06223/712694-254.stm (URL accessed 10/06/06)
  3. ^ "Author mines Jewish history". by Kerry Lengel, The Arizona Republic. 2006-10-04. Retrieved 2007-01-18. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  4. ^ a b ""Jews with Swords" Are Coming". The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay. Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  5. ^ Sean Bugg (March 14, 2002). "Blurring the Lines: Interview with Michael Chabon". MetroWeekly.
  6. ^ "On 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh". by Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books. Excerpt of the article can be viewed for free at http://www.tinmanic.com/archives/2005/05/25/chabons-news/. 2005-06-09. Retrieved 2007-01-18. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  7. ^ Chabon, Michael. “The Editor’s Notebook: A Confidential Chat with the Editor.” McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Ed. Michael Chabon. New York: Vintage, 2002.
  8. ^ a b "'The Final Solution': Bird of the Baskervilles". by Deborah Friedell, The New York Times. 2004-11-14. Retrieved 2007-01-18. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  9. ^ http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/chabonmichael/finalsolution
  10. ^ "Chabon's wartime 'Solution' is murder most bland". by Kurt Jensen, The Boston Globe. 2004-12-26. Retrieved 2007-01-18. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  11. ^ Chabon, Michael. "Introduction." The Best American Short Stories 2005. Ed. Michael Chabon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
  12. ^ http://www.michaelchabon.com/archives/2005/07/maybe_not_so_mu.html
  13. ^ http://www.michaelchabon.com/archives/2005/03/an_account_of_a.html
  14. ^ "Kavalier Movie Pretty Much Moribund Right Now". The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay. Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  15. ^ "Raimi Spills About 'Spider 3'". Zap2It.com Movie News. Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  16. ^ "Disney, Chabon retelling 'Snow'". by Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter. 2004-10-29. Retrieved 2007-01-18. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
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