Michael Chabon

Novelist, short-story writer, columnist, and screenwriter

• Born: May 24, 1963
• Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

Chabon writes in a variety of literary genres, addressing such themes as escapism, superheroes, and the powerful force of history.

Early Life

Michael Chabon was born in Washington, DC, to Robert, a physician, and Sharon, a lawyer. When Chabon was eleven years old, his parents divorced, and he began to reside with his mother. He was raised primarily in Columbia, Maryland, in the middle of tobacco country. While growing up, he enjoyed reading comic books and was certain from a young age that he would pursue a career in writing. In an essay written for the New Yorker in 2008, Chabon recalls sitting in a religious-school class on Jewish ethics and hearing his teacher raise the issue of escapism and its accompanying ethical problems. The story Chabon’s teacher told—about a child who loved Superman so much that he secured a red towel around his neck and then jumped to his death from the roof of his house—was memorable not because it suggested a kind of danger associated with escapism, but because it signaled a cultural need for transformation, a theme that Chabon would explore in his writing.

Chabon studied at Carnegie-Mellon as well as at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned an undergraduate degree in English in 1984. He also received a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, which proved to be a critical juncture for the start of his career. While at Irvine, Chabon began working on his master’s thesis, which would eventually become his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published in 1988. The novel was on the New York Times list of best sellers, and so was his second novel, Wonder Boys, which was published seven years later and was made into a film in 2000, featuring Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas.

Chabon has often expressed astonishment at the success of his literary career. It comes as no surprise, then, that it was not Chabon who submitted his first manuscript for publication, but his professor, Donald Heiney (who writes under the pseudonym of MacDonald Harris), who submitted Chabon’s master’s thesis to a literary agent who in turn secured Chabon a $155,000 advance—an amount much higher than the typical advance given to new writers at that time.

In 1987, Chabon married the poet Lollie Groth, but this marriage ended in 1991, and later Chabon married the writer Ayelet Waldman. Chabon and Waldman moved to Berkeley, California, and had four children: Sophie, born in 1994; Ezekiel “Zeke” Napoleon Waldman, born in 1997; Ida-Rose, born in 2001; and Abraham Wolf Waldman, born in 2003.

Life’s Work

Shortly after publishing his second novel, Chabon discovered a box of old comic books from his youth and began working on his third novel, which would mark a turn in his work toward an exploration of the themes of escapism and fantasy. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It was also a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay harks back to the work of other great Jewish comics creators, such as Will Eisner, and follows the characters Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two Jewish cousins who create comic books in the early 1940s and the years leading up to the entry of the United States into World War II. The novel tracks the rise of the modern superhero and connects it to the ancient story of the golem.

Chabon does not deal directly with the events of World War II, but his 2005 novella, The Final Solution, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, tells the story of Linus Steinman, a mute nine-year-old boy who has escaped Nazi Germany with his sole companion, an African parrot. The Final Solution deals indirectly with the aftermath of the Holocaust, yet it is devoid of the expected images or descriptions of corpses, camps, and gas chambers. The Holocaust is not directly mentioned except for a few oblique allusions. Instead, the reader is forced to consider the tragedy that hovers darkly over the story.

Chabon has written collections of short stories including A Model World and Other Stories (1990) and Werewolves in Their Youth (1999). His first young adult novel, Summerland, was published in 2002, and he has written articles and essays, screenplays (sharing story credit for the 2004 film Spider-Man 2), and has edited the collection The Best American Short Stories, 2005. His 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a hard-boiled detective novel set in an alternate world in which the state of Israel failed to come into existence. Chabon offers readers a counterhistory in which millions of European Jewish refugees take shelter in Alaska, creating a Yiddish colony. The novel spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won a 2008 Hugo Award.Gentlemen of the Road, a fifteen-part serial novel about two ancient Khazar bandits. The novel's parts first ran in the New York Times Magazine and were later compiled and published in 2007. Chabon has published collections of essays, including Maps and Legends (2008) and Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009).

Chabon published his critically-acclaimed novel Moonglowin 2016. He followed that novel with the memoir and essay collection Pops: Fatherhood in 2018. Chabon then published the nonfiction book Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros (2019). In 2023, Chabon joined David Henry Hwang and other writers in a lawsuit accusing the Meta AI platform LLaMA of copyright infringement.

Significance

Chabon is skilled in many literary genres, and he is the rare artist whose works appeal to many different types of readers. Avid readers of comic books, of detective stories, of gangster mob tales, and of alternate histories will find something pleasing in Chabon’s works. One of his common themes is redemption, and another is the overwhelming power of historical forces. Chabon creates characters who come alive, reflecting readers’ secret desires for fantasy and for escape.

Bibliography

Behlman, Lee. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction.” Shofar 22, no. 3 (Spring, 2003): 56–71. Print.

Colby, Tanner. "Can a White Author Write Black Characters? Michael Chabon Says Yes. And He's Right. This Shouldn't Be Controversial." Slate. The Slate Group, 19 Sept. 2012. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.

Goldsmith, Jill. "Michael Cabon, David Henry Hwang, Other Writers Sue Meta AI Platform LLaMA for Copyright Infringement, Seek Class Action Status." Deadline, 12 Sept. 2023, deadline.com/2023/09/michael-chabon-david-henry-hwang-writers-sue-meta-ai-llama-copyright-1235544842/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Feeney, Matt. "Michael Chabon's Oakland." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 26 Sept 2012. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.

"Michael Chabon." Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2015. Web. 5 Jan. 2015.

Myers, D. G. “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews.” Sewanee Review 16, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 572–88. Print.

Straub, Peter, ed. American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s to Now. New York: Library of America, 2009. Print.

Tranter, Rhys. "The Short of It: A Review of 'Bookends,' By Michael Chabon." Datebook, 23 Jan. 2019, datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/the-short-of-it-a-review-of-bookends-by-michael-chabon. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.