Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1977
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Early life and education
Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.
Foer is the middle son in this Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is the founder of Atlas Obscura and author of Moonwalking with Einstein (2011). Jonathan was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."
Foer attended Princeton and in 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates. Oates took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy."
Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.
After graduating from Princeton in 1999, Foer attended briefly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.
Writing
In 2001, Foer edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe."
He also traveled to Ukraine to expand his Princeton senior thesis, which grew into his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The book was published in 2002, winning a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award. In 2005, Liev Schreiber adapted the book to film (writing and directing); the movie starred Elijah Wood.
The year 2005 also saw the release of Foer's second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. With 9/11 as a backdrop for the story, Foer uses a technique known as "visual writing" by including photographs of doorknobs and other oddities, and ending the novel with a 14-page flipbook. The technique garnered both praise and criticism. This book was adapted to film in 2012; Tom Hanks, Thomas Horn, and Sandra Bullock starred.
Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2005. In 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an expose of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.
In 2009, Foer published a work of nonfiction, Eating Animals, an examination of factory farming. The book asks how humans can be so loving to our companion animals while simultaneously indifferent to others. Foer explores what this inconsistency tells us about ourselves.
Foer published his third novel, Tree of Codes, to mixed reviews in released in 2010. His fourth novel, Here I Am, came out in 2016—this one to high praise. Publishers Weekly claimed it showed "the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer."
Other
In 2006 Foer recorded the narration for "If This Is Kosher...", PETA's undercover investigation of the world's largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse. The New York Times referred to the 30-minute video as "grisly." Foer also serves as a board member for Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farm animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.
In 2008, Foer taught writing as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University. He is currently a writer-in-residence in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.
Personal
Foer married writer Nicole Krauss in 2004. They lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, with their children. The couple separated amicably in 2014 and now live in different homes elsewhere in Brooklyn, but in proximity to one another. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9.5.2016.)