Jonathan Lethem

James Harvey Peacock (University of Keele)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 19 Feb 1964
Activity 1989-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Editor
Essayist
Novelist
Story-writer

Resources

Lethem's Works

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On 20 September 2005 Jonathan Allen Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant”. Accolades do not come much higher for a writer, yet for many years Lethem's career had appeared to be taking a different course. Following his father, Richard Brown Lethem, he devoted his creative energies to visual art from an early age. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, producing paintings he now dismisses as “glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish” (

Post Road

). At Bennington College, Vermont, in 1982, Lethem realised not only that his radical, bohemian upbringing in multicultural Brooklyn made it difficult to relate to the privileged white kids all around him, but also that he really wanted to be a writer rather than an artist. Dropping out of college,…

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2633 words

Citation: Peacock, James Harvey. "Jonathan Lethem". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12613, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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