Franzen's fear of losing his street cred as a result of Oprah's Book Club is now ancient history.įranzen has set out to write a Social Novel in a Tragic Realism style in the genre of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Certainly, Franzen leveraged his own personal experience, for which an article entitled 'My Father's Brain' in The New Yorker (the day before 9/11), is a testimonial to his own experience with a father with Alzheimer's. It is interesting to note that Saul Bellow, generally credited with sharing the mantle of best American 20 th century author with Faulkner, spent much of his life in Chicago, and first leveraged that regional experience into The Adventures of Augie March, which many consider, to this day, a major triumph of American literature. Louis suburb of Webster Groves, Missouri. Franzen spent most of his youth in the St. However, comments in his Harper's essay 'Perchance to Dream' reveal that he harbored that desire (see post below). We can never be certain that Jonathan Franzen was on a mission to write the first Great American Novel of the 21st century (capturing the last days of the previous one), but regardless, many critics think he did, at least one comparing The Corrections (2001) to Mann's Buddenbrooks.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen