Jonathan Lethem

James Harvey Peacock (University of Keele)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 19 Feb 1964
Activity 1989-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Editor
Essayist
Novelist
Story-writer

Resources

Lethem's Works

Save to Bookshelf

On 20 September 2005 Jonathan Allen Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant”. Accolades do not come much higher for a writer, yet for many years Lethem's career had appeared to be taking a different course. Following his father, Richard Brown Lethem, he devoted his creative energies to visual art from an early age. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, producing paintings he now dismisses as “glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish” (

Post Road

). At Bennington College, Vermont, in 1982, Lethem realised not only that his radical, bohemian upbringing in multicultural Brooklyn made it difficult to relate to the privileged white kids all around him, but also that he really wanted to be a writer rather than an artist. Dropping out of college,…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2633 words

Citation: Peacock, James Harvey. "Jonathan Lethem". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12613, accessed 19 April 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here