Jonathan Allen Lethem (LEE-thum,[1] born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels.
In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter.[2][3] He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia.[4][5] His brother Blake became an artist involved in the early New York hip hop scene, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn in the northern section of the neighborhood of Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Lethem’s fourth grade teacher at P.S. 29 in nearby Cobble Hill was future New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, whom he called the “perfect” teacher and dedicated his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music to her.[6] Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as “thrilling” and culturally wide-reaching.[2] He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release,[7] and read the complete works of the science fictionwriter Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was “as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel.”[8]
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor,[9] an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song “Like a Rolling Stone” in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, “My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone.”[2]
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as “glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish”.[10] At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an “overwhelming….collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor….at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege.”[10] This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado to Berkeley, California in 1984, across “a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket,” describing it as “one of the stupidest and most memorable things I’ve ever done.”[11]
Lethem lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe’s and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time.[12] Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.[13]