Early Life
Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977 in Washington D.C. He is the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and the president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, CEO of the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. Jonathan is the middle child with an older brother, Franklin, and younger brother, Joshua. When he was younger, Jonathan Foer attended Georgetown Day School then went on to go to Princeton University. At Princeton, author Joyce Carol Oates inspired Foer to begin a writing career. As a senior, Jonathan Foer wrote a thesis about his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and won Princeton’s Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize. This thesis soon after became the topic of Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a degree in Philosophy. Soon after Jonathan attended Mount Sinai School of Medicine, but dropped out to pursue writing. |
|
Career
In 2001 Foer assisted in editing an anthology in which he added his own short story “If the Aging Man should Begin to Believe". Jonathan Foer's first big break came from the thesis he had written while attending Princeton. Foer expanded on the thesis and it soon grew into the novel Everything is Illuminated. "Everything Is Illuminated is the story of a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer’s search in the Ukraine for the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis" (Identity Theory -Jonathan Safran Foer). The book won the National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award and soon became a movie. Following release of Everything is Illuminated", Foer wrote Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in 2005 (which also became a movie in 2011). In the same year, Jonathan Foer wrote a libretto for the opera Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence. In 2009, influenced by his decision to be vegetarian, Foer wrote his first non-fiction book, Eating Animals. For a short time he taught Writing at Yale during the spring of 2008 and currently, 2014, Jonathan is a professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. In 2010, Foer published his third novel, Tree of Codes, and in 2014 he is expected to release his fourth novel called Escape from Children’s Hospital. Recently, Foer did a collaboration with Chipotle in which the company featured some of his essays on their famous paper cups. |
Sources:
"Biography." Jonathan Safran Foer. Blog Spot, n.d. Web. <http://jonathansafranfoer.blogspot.com/p/biography.html>.
"Jonathan Safran Foer on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. June 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEE1hMopdpo>.
"Biography." Jonathan Safran Foer. Blog Spot, n.d. Web. <http://jonathansafranfoer.blogspot.com/p/biography.html>.
"Jonathan Safran Foer on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. June 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEE1hMopdpo>.