Publication Order of A Key to All Mythologies Books
| Crossroads | 2021 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Twenty-Seventh City | 1988 |
| Strong Motion | 1992 |
| The Corrections | 2001 |
| Freedom | 2010 |
| Purity | 2015 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| How to Be Alone | 2002 |
| The Discomfort Zone | 2006 |
| Farther Away | 2012 |
| The Kraus Project | 2013 |
| The End of the End of the Earth | 2018 |
About Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist, born in 1959. “The Corrections” (2001) won the National Book Award, “Freedom” followed in 2010, and his sixth novel, “Crossroads” (2021), is the first volume of a planned trilogy.
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, and grew up in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. He graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in German in 1981 and spent the following year in Berlin on a Fulbright Scholarship. He wrote his first novel while working as a research assistant in Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “The Twenty-Seventh City” (1988) is set in St. Louis, and “Strong Motion” (1992) follows a family, the Hollands, against a series of earthquakes on the American East Coast.
“The Corrections” also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in September 2001, then withdrew her invitation to Franzen after he voiced unease about the selection. The episode drew wide media attention, and the book became one of the best-selling literary novels of its decade. When “Freedom” came out, Time magazine put him on its cover under the headline “Great American Novelist”, and Winfrey picked that novel for her book club as well.
“Purity” (2015) centres on Purity Tyler, known as Pip, a young woman trying to find out who her father is, and moves between the United States, South America and East Germany. “Crossroads” is about a pastor, his wife and their four children, and opens the trilogy “A Key to All Mythologies”. In June 2026 The New Yorker published “A Talent for Seeming”, a story drawn from the sequel he is writing. No title or publication date has been announced for that book.
His non-fiction includes the essay collections “How to Be Alone”, “Farther Away” and “The End of the End of the Earth”, and a memoir, “The Discomfort Zone”. He has written for The New Yorker since 1994. A keen birdwatcher, he has served on the board of the American Bird Conservancy, and he lives in Santa Cruz, California. In April 2026 Netflix announced a limited series of “The Corrections” with Meryl Streep as Enid Lambert, directed by Cord Jefferson from Franzen’s own screenplay.
Photo: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).