JONATHAN

LETHEM

Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964) is a writer of essays, novels, and short stories. His work has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Tin House, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. As the diversity of these publications suggests (and as the essay following confirms), Lethem is known for crossing categories of genre and taste. He has written about Bob Dylan, baseball, and Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño. He is fully immersed in the literature, art, and popular culture of our time.

The son of a painter and a political activist, Lethem grew up in a Brooklyn commune. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and went on to Bennington College in Vermont, where he studied alongside writers Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. He abandoned college in his sophomore year, opting instead for what he called “an old-fashioned apprenticeship for a writer”: a job selling antiquarian books. Lethem’s first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music was published in 1994; later works, like Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003), earned the author a National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” commendation respectively. Lethem went on to produce multiple collections of short stories and essays, and in 2005, he received a prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

The Ecstasy of Influence was first published in Harper’s Magazine in February 2007 before being included in an essay collection of the same name in 2012. The essay quickly caused a firestorm of criticism and became a topic of debate on college campuses across the country. You’ll see why.