Michael Chabon Biography

Michael Chabon (pronounced “shaybin”) was born in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and went on to study creative writing as a Regents Fellow at the University of California at Irvine. He submitted his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his graduate adviser, novelist MacDonald Harris, who then recommended it to his literary agent. The book was accepted for publication when Chabon was twenty-three years old. Chabon subsequently completed his master’s of fine arts degree. The success of his first novel plunged Chabon into a glamorous world of endorsement offers (deals from the Gap and People magazine)—all of which he rejected. He settled with his first wife, Lolly Groth, in Seattle, Washington. After their divorce he married Ayelet Waldman and settled first in San Francisco, then in Los Angeles.

Michael Chabon was born on May 24, 1963, in Washington, D.C., and raised partly in Columbia, Maryland, and partly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents divorced when Chabon was an adolescent. During this time the young Chabon turned to comic books and works of genre fiction (such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories) to escape the domestic strife in his life. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, earning a B.A. in English in 1984; from there he attended the master of fine arts program at the University of California at Irvine, where he would earn his degree in 1987. More important, one of his advisers at Irvine, novelist Donald Heiney, was so impressed with Chabon’s thesis that he sent the manuscript to his own agent; the novel was purchased for $155,000 (almost an unheard-of sum for a first literary novel in 1987) and was published to great advance praise. That same year, Chabon married poet Lollie Groth, a union that would end with their divorce in 1991.

For the next several years, Chabon worked on a novel that he planned to title “Fountain City,” about environmental activism and a baseball park in Florida, among other things; the novel became longer and longer, until Chabon realized that it was not succeeding and put it aside to begin work on a novel about a man unable to finish a sprawling novel, Wonder Boys. Chabon married attorney Ayelet Waldman in 1993, with whom he would eventually have three children (Sophie, Ezekiel, and Ida-Rose). The successful adaptation of Wonder Boys into a film (directed by Curtis Hanson) released in 2000 combined with the author’s thriving sales to make him financially independent and able to focus on his work. Chabon’s second wife, Waldman has published a number of mystery novels in a series known as the Mommy-Track Mysteries; her successful work in genre fiction parallels Chabon’s own interest in the field. Since his work on Spider-Man 2 (directed by Sam Raimi), Chabon has balanced his busy life writing fiction with work on screenplays.