Jonathan Safran Foer, American novelist, was born in the United States in 1977 and is married to novelist Nicole Krauss. He studied philosophy as a major at Princeton University and also took courses in creative writing. Joyce Carol Oates was one of his tutors and she played an active part in encouraging him to continue writing. His work has since been published in the Paris Review and the New Yorker and he is the editor of the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell (2001).
His first novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) was published to mainly rapturous reviews. It has some basis in autobiography as it was inspired by a trip he took to search for the woman who saved his grandfather during the Second World War. This was followed by a second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which draws on the impact of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. A nine-year-old boy, Oskar, is used as the first-person narrator and the readers are made witnesses to his trauma following the killing of his father on that morning of 9th September. He has also written a libretto for Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence (2005).
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