Michael Chabon

With his insightful and often bittersweet stories of youth and imagination, writer Michael Chabon made a profound impact on contemporary literature at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, not unlike past literary figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, Chabon tried his hand in Hollywood, leading to success as writer of the novel-turned-film, “Wonder Boys” (2000), as well as screenwriter for his own source material, “The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay” (2007).

Chabon was born May 24, 1963 in Washington, D.C. and raised in the suburbs of Maryland. His parents divorced when he was young, and although he has never described his childhood as troubled, it was filled with a combination of fantasy and enterprise. A devout reader with a soaring imagination, he formed creative partnerships with his friends from the outset, even starting a comic book company of his own by the age of 10. While he often drew the epic tales of fantasy and adventure, his main focus was on writing, and it was around this time that, using his mother’s typewriter, he churned out his first short story in which Sherlock Holmes meets Captain Nemo. In his teens, Chabon abandoned comics and delved head-first into another art form – music. He started his own punk band, the Brats, for which he was lead singer, while in college at the University of Pittsburgh, where he majored in International Studies and Government.

While pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California in Irvine, Chabon wrote a piece of fiction entitled, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , as his master’s thesis. His instructor suggested that he submit it to a publisher, and in 1988, it was released as a novel when Chabon was just 24 years old. Because of a central theme where the main character explored various sides of his sexuality, it was widely assumed that Chabon himself was gay. Although a self-avowed heterosexual who would later marry mystery novelist Ayelet Waldman and have three children, Chabon always maintained that he never minded the speculation and that gay themes would continue to pop up in his work.

Chabon next attempted to write an epic entitled Fountain City , but soon found the novel spiraling so out of control that he abandoned it. He turned the daunting experience into the novel, Wonder Boys , about an author also struggling with a mammoth work. Published in 1995, the book was adapted into the Curtis Hanson-directed film of the same name, starring Michael Douglas and Tobey MaGuire. The film’s critical acclaim brought Chabon widespread fame for the first, but not last time.

He next turned his attention to what would be his seminal effort – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – a story chronicling the friendship of two Jewish kids in the 1940s, who set about creating their own comic book hero, The Escapist, as a way to deal with the struggles of growing up. In the story, Joe Kavalier left his parents behind in Nazi-occupied Europe while Sammy Clay struggled with his homosexuality. Partially inspired by the real-life creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – as well as Chabon’s own childhood – Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Chabon eventually turned The Escapist into a real comic book, whose anthology of stories featured the work of a bevy of powerful and popular artistic talent.

His next book was Summerland in 2002, about a young baseball lover who gets whisked away into a fantasy land. The rights were soon picked up by Robert De Niro, who was interested in producing a movie adaptation.

Chabon also forged an unusual horror/fantasy fiction persona, under the name of August Van Zorn. More elaborately developed than a pseudonym, August Van Zorn was purported to be a pen name for one Albert Vetch (1899-1963), described by Chabon as "the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century." Van Zorn was both a peripheral character in Wonder Boys (in which the main characters share a fascination with Van Zorn), and the attributed author of In The Black Mill , a short story in Chabon's 1999 collection Werewolves in Their Youth. . Chabon went on to create a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn and even gave him an equally-fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre, named Leon Chaim Bach. In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn.”

With his unique combination of literary and comic book clout, Chabon was asked to write both the “X-Men” (2000) and “Spider-Man 2” (2004) screenplays. Although producers opted to use additional writers for the final shooting scripts, Chabon received a story credit for the Spider-Man sequel. Inspired by the process nonetheless, Chabon focused his screenwriting efforts on adapting his own Kavalier & Clay for the big screen, as well as the screenplay, “Snow and the Seven,” a martial arts adventure story loosely based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

The prolific writer, whose stock continued to rise with the comic book/sci-fi fan boy sect, wrote an unproduced science fiction screenplay entitled “The Martian Agent,” for director Jan de Bont, and his first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh , was also considered for a big screen adaptation. He was initially linked to the screenplay for “Spider-Man 3” (2007) during pre-production, but was eventually passed over.