42 Facts About Michael Chabon

1.

Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer.

2.

Michael Chabon subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

3.

Michael Chabon followed it with Wonder Boys and two short-story collections.

4.

In 2012, Michael Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004.

5.

Michael Chabon followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989.

6.

Michael Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity.

7.

Michael Chabon often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work.

8.

Michael Chabon's parents are Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer.

9.

Michael Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when, at the age of ten, he wrote his first short story for a class assignment.

10.

Michael Chabon's parents divorced when he was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, Maryland.

11.

Michael Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984.

12.

Michael Chabon then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

13.

Michael Chabon drew on his experiences with Fountain City for the character of Grady Tripp, a frustrated novelist who has spent years working on an immense fourth novel.

14.

Michael Chabon wrote Wonder Boys in a dizzy seven-month streak, without telling his agent or publisher he'd abandoned Fountain City.

15.

In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from the unfinished 1,500 page Fountain City manuscript, "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript" written by Michael Chabon, was included in McSweeney's 36.

16.

In 2002, Michael Chabon published Summerland, a fantasy novel written for younger readers that received mixed reviews but sold extremely well, and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

17.

In late 2006, Michael Chabon completed work on Gentlemen of the Road, a 15-part serialized novel that ran in The New York Times Magazine from January 28 to May 6,2007.

18.

Also in 2008, Chabon received the Peggy V Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

19.

Michael Chabon co-edited the volume with Ayelet Waldman, and they both contributed essays to the collection.

20.

Michael Chabon had previously weighed in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2010, having written an op-ed piece for the New York Times in June 2010 in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botching of the Gaza flotilla raid and the explanations that followed.

21.

The book serves as a fundraiser for MacDowell, to which Michael Chabon is contributing all royalties.

22.

Hundreds of authors, Michael Chabon included, condemned Amazon in an open letter because Amazon stopped taking pre-orders for books published by Hachette.

23.

Michael Chabon married the Israeli-born writer Ayelet Waldman in 1993.

24.

Subsequently, Michael Chabon included a brief, fictionalized 'cameo' by Obama in his 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue.

25.

Since 2016, Michael Chabon has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, both during his campaign for the presidency, and during his administration.

26.

Michael Chabon seeks to "annihilate" not the genres themselves, but the bias against certain genres of fiction such as fantasy, science fiction and romance.

27.

Michael Chabon makes good on his claim: a successful detective story need not be lacking in literary merit.

28.

Michael Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn, along with an equally fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre named Leon Chaim Bach.

29.

Michael Chabon has provided several subtle hints throughout his work that the stories he tells take place in a shared fictional universe.

30.

In 2014, Michael Chabon was involved in writing lyrics for Mark Ronson's album Uptown Special.

31.

Michael Chabon penned "Crack in the Pearl", and after growing chemistry with Ronson and Jeff Bhasker, worked on more songs for the album.

32.

In total, Michael Chabon helped write 9 of the 11 songs on the album, not including mega-smash hit, "Uptown Funk".

33.

Michael Chabon has collaborated with Adam Schlesinger on the song "House of Broken Gingerbread" written for the Monkees' October 2018 album Christmas Party.

34.

Michael Chabon co-wrote "Boxes" for Moses Sumney, and wrote for an unreleased Charlie Puth song.

35.

Michael Chabon's work remains popular in Hollywood, with Rudin purchasing the film rights to The Yiddish Policemen's Union, then titled Hatzeplatz, in 2002, five years before the book would be published.

36.

Michael Chabon wrote a draft for 2004's Spider-Man 2, about a third of which was used in the final film.

37.

In October 2004, it was announced that Michael Chabon was at work writing Disney's Snow and the Seven, a live-action martial arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be directed by master Hong Kong fight choreographer and director Yuen Wo Ping.

38.

However, as of 2018, Michael Chabon expressed skepticism that the Coens would make the film, saying that they had effectively chosen to make A Serious Man instead, and did not wish to do another film with such similar themes.

39.

In July 2015, Michael Chabon was hired to do revisions to the script for Disney's Bob the Musical.

40.

Michael Chabon joined the writing team of Star Trek: Picard, a new Star Trek series starring Patrick Stewart, and was named showrunner in July 2019.

41.

In November 2018, a Star Trek: Short Treks episode co-written by Michael Chabon, titled "Calypso", was released.

42.

Michael Chabon was listed as co-creator of the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, and has been working on a television adaptation of Kavalier and Clay with his wife Ayelet Waldman since at least December 2019.