JONATHAN FRANZEN grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of three novelsThe Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and The Correctionsand a collection of essays How to Be Alone. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and the National Book Award (for The Corrections). He has been named one of "Twenty Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker, for whom he frequently writes, and one of the "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta. He lives in New York.