John Green

• Born: August 24, 1977
• Place of Birth: Indianapolis, Indiana

Place of birth: Indianapolis, Indiana

Biography

John Green is an award-winning writer of young-adult novels. Thanks to word-of-mouth momentum, his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars—a New York Times bestseller and a hit film in 2014—made Green one of the most popular young-adult writers in the business. In a genre often divided by gender and age, Green enjoys a diverse following of teenagers and adults. His first novel, Looking for Alaska (2005), won the Michael L. Printz Award in 2006. In 2009, he won the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel for his book Paper Towns (2008). The movie adaptation of Paper Towns was released in 2015. His fifth novel, Turtles All the Way Down, debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list in 2017. In 2021, Green released a nonfiction work, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, to accompany his 2018 podcast of the same name. In 2024, Green executive produced a movie based on his novel Turtles All the Way Down, which appeared on the streaming service Max.

Green was born on August 24, 1977, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and grew up in Orlando, Florida, where his father, Mike, worked as the state director of the Nature Conservancy, and his mother, Sydney, was a homemaker before joining the staff of a nonprofit called the Healthy Community Initiative. Green did poorly—both academically and socially—in middle school. When he was fifteen, his parents enrolled him in a Birmingham, Alabama, boarding school called Indian Springs. The school fostered a love of books and academia. At Indian Springs, Green fell in love with the works of authors such as J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and Toni Morrison and made several friends who shared his love of literature, though he remained a mediocre student.

In 1995, Green graduated from high school and enrolled at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he double majored in religion and literature. He took a writing class with the novelist P. F. Kluge, though he failed to make the cut for Kluge's advanced writing course. In 2000, Green graduated and considered going to divinity school. He spent six months as an apprentice chaplain at a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. It was a sad and profound experience for him (though one he mined to comic effect in The Fault in Our Stars), and he decided not to pursue a career in religion.

Instead, Green moved to Chicago, where he took a job in data entry for the American Library Association (ALA) magazine Booklist. He quickly made friends with the magazine's editors and began writing book reviews. After Looking for Alaska was published in 2005, he quit his job to focus on writing, though he soon found that he did not enjoy the solitude of a writer's life. In 2006, Green and his younger brother Hank started making YouTube videos for each other to keep in touch. The videos—which feature Green and his brother riffing on obscure, funny, or wonky topics—garnered an enormous following. Fans developed a vocabulary based on Green's distinctive way of speaking and dubbed themselves the Nerdfighters, after a word Green used in one of his videos. The Green brothers—and Green's wife, Sarah—run the Vlogbrothers, the original name for the correspondence endeavor, as a video blog business featuring other channels devoted to science and art. In 2010, the brothers created the annual online video conference VidCon. By 2024, the Volgbrothers was home to several online series, including Crash Course, an educational channel, and Project for Awesome, a live stream of an annual charity event. In 2018, Green launched the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, which talks about aspects of life on Earth during the Anthropocene epoch.

Green met his wife, Sarah Urist, an art gallerist and Indian Springs alum, while he was living in Chicago. They live in Indianapolis with their two children.

Major Works

Green’s first novel, Looking for Alaska, was published in 2005. Following a teenager and his friends attending a boarding school and navigating tragedy, Looking for Alaska earned Green the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association. In 2019, it was announced that the streaming service Hulu had adapted the novel into a limited series. His second novel, An Abundance of Katherines (2006), was nominated for the Printz Award. In 2008, Green published Paper Towns, which is about a boy’s quest to find his missing neighbor after helping her get revenge on a group of classmates. The novel was awarded the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel before being adapted into a film of the same name in 2015. His next novel, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, co-written with David Levithan, was named an Honor Book for both the Stonewall Book Award and the Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production.

Green's most famous novel, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), is about two teenagers with terminal cancer. The book's premise springs from Green's brief work as a chaplain, but its protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster, is loosely based on an early Nerdfighter named Esther, who suffered from thyroid cancer (like Hazel in the book) and died at the age of sixteen. Green wanted to write a book about Esther and the kids he had known who embraced their full humanity and did not treat those who were ill or dying as Other. Hazel and her boyfriend, August, are dynamic and unique characters with strengths and weaknesses fundamentally separate from their illnesses. Hazel, the book's whip-smart narrator, has a biting sense of humor that masks her fear of dying. She brightens when she meets August, the charming former basketball player with an amputated leg. August can spar with Hazel on her intellectual level, but he is wrapped up in a performance of “himself” and is consumed by a desire to be remembered. Therefore, he needs Hazel to remind him that enjoying his own life is more important than what he leaves behind. Despite its saccharine-sounding themes, The Fault in Our Stars actively resists sentimentality, even when depicting one main character's unpleasant death.

The novel is a perfect example of Green's writing style, which reflects his own personality: gregarious, intellectual, playful, and a bit verbose. His books appeal to a wide audience because he does not “talk down” to his young characters or his young audience. “[Green] writes for youth, rather than to them,” Rachel Syme wrote for National Public Radio.

In 2017, Green published Turtles All the Way Down, which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Following a teenager coping with OCD and anxiety, Turtles All the Way Down explores the complexities of mental illness, friendships, and romance as two friends search for a fugitive millionaire. In 2021, Green released a nonfiction work, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, which followed his 2018 podcast of the same name. The podcast and the book of essays looks at myriad and diverse topics affecting the human-centered planet. Green discusses COVID-19, unhealthy foods, and the loss of species among other topics. The book was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction and won a Goodreads Choice Award.

Bibliography

“Bio — John Green.” John Green, www.johngreenbooks.com/bio. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Goldstick, Adam, et al. “John Green at First Amendment Week on Censorship, Advocacy and Hope for Humanity.” Los Angeles Loyolan, 7 Feb. 2024, www.laloyolan.com/news/john-green-at-first-amendment-week-on-censorship-advocacy-and-hope-for-humanity/article‗746b9bb6-714c-5395-9b57-0940e56d604a.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Miller, Laura. “"The Fault in Our Stars" Has Been Unfairly Bashed by Critics who Don't Understand It.” Salon.com, 6 June 2014, www.salon.com/2014/06/06/the‗fault‗in‗our‗stars‗has‗been‗unfairly‗bashed‗by‗critics‗who‗dont‗understand‗it. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Ragupathi, Anjali. “John Green Talks 'Turtles,' YouTube and Turning Away from YA.” The Stanford Daily, 23 Apr. 2024, stanforddaily.com/2024/04/23/john-green-talks-turtles-youtube-and-turning-away-from-ya. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Rosen, Rebecca J. “John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars:' Not a ‘Bullshit Cancer Book.’” The Atlantic, 25 Feb. 2013, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/02/how-john-green-wrote-a-cancer-book-but-not-a-bullshit-cancer-book/273441. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Syme, Rachel, and John Green. “'The Fault In Our Stars:' Love In A Time Of Cancer.” NPR, 17 Jan. 2012, www.npr.org/2012/01/17/145343351/the-fault-in-our-stars-love-in-a-time-of-cancer. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Talbot, Margaret. “The Teen Whisperer.” The New Yorker, 2 June 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/the-teen-whisperer. Accessed 11 July 2024.