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Michael Chabon is a novelist, screenwriter, columnist and short story writer, best known for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.
He grew up reading comic books and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer. In 1984 he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in English. In 1987, he received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine. His master's thesis was the novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a coming-of-age story about a man caught between romances with a man on one side, a woman on the other, and the shadow of his gangster father over it all.
It's well known that Michael Chabon is a celebrant of genre fiction, and he has shown no trepidation at all in exploring the genres in his work: Kavalier & Clay (2000) is historical fiction with a comics focus, Summerland (2002) is a fantasy novel for young readers; The Final Solution (2004) and The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007); and Gentlemen of the Road is a swash-buckling adventure story that was serialized first in The New York Times Magazine. In 2008, Chabon published a collection of essays entitled Maps and Legends in which he writes about the merit of the genres. In his novels, Chabon explores themes of Jewish identity, family, and magic.
The topic of his talk at Stanford is Notions of Home.
Photo credit: Stephanie Rausser