He was the middle child, sensitive and flamboyant, but at age eight he was changed during a summer program, a classroom experiment went badly wrong. Safran Foer grew up in Washington DC with a lawyer father, a corporate VP mother, and two brothers. Then she fell ill, and I found a different agent who then sent it to many of the same editors who had rejected it, and suddenly there was a bidding war. Word for word, the same book that got published.

She sent the book to every publishing house in New York, and I mean the same book.

After being rejected by more than a dozen agents, destiny made her long-awaited entrance. The story was personal, insightful, and original, but it could easily have gone nowhere. “Opened it and closed it,” and it looked as if it wanted to fly away from his hands. It appeared that a part of him wanted “to write everything, every word of what occurred” into his diary, and a part of him refused “to write even one word.” He opened the diary and closed it. (Excerpt from Everything is Illuminated ): All this told through a fictional local guide, Alex Perchov. It recounts his own real-life journey to Ukraine where he searched for details of his grandfather’s early life and his survival of the Holocaust. Writing clarifies me to me.įoer was just 25 when he exploded onto the literary scene with the international bestseller, and later critically acclaimed movie, Everything is Illuminated. Jonathan Safran Foer: I only feel lost most of the time, and through writing, I feel less confused, and less alienated from others, from myself, from my own weird stew of contradictory thoughts and feelings. He’s the celebrated author of six acclaimed books, four fiction, two nonfiction, all of which capture and process the sensations, thoughts, and feelings that would otherwise be impossible for him to express. Jonathan Safran Foer has found his own unique ways to understand the world. Foer teaches creative writing at New York University. He has since written two more novels and another nonfiction book.

His bestselling 2009 nonfiction book, Eating Animals, details the ethical implications of industrialized meat. Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), set in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was also a popular success adapted into a motion picture. Elijah Wood starred in the 2005 film version.

He expanded this thesis into Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a metafictional novel about “Jonathan Safran Foer” traveling to Poland in search of the woman who saved his grandfather. While studying philosophy at Princeton University he wrote a creative writing thesis on his maternal grandfather under the guidance of novelist Joyce Carol Oates. His mother was the child of Polish Jewish holocaust survivors. Jonathan Safran Foer is a bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction, known for his modernist literary techniques and weighty subject matter.įoer was born in Washington, DC, in 1977.

Jonathan foer everything is illuminated