Douglas Coupland (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian visual artist and writer. Trained originally as a sculptor, Coupland found unexpected success as a novelist with the publication of his 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has since gone on to publish dozens of books, including novels, short story collections, and essay collections. He has also worked as a columnist and contributor for a number of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and Wired Magazine.
Coupland has maintained a prolific visual art practice in parallel to his literary career, with the former eventually becoming his main focus. Primarily a mixture of sculpture and painting, his art–like his writing–has explored a variety of interests, including 20th-century pop culture, the relationship between technology and society, environmental pollution, spirituality, ecology, and the nature of Canadian national identity. Coupland’s art has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world: His first major retrospective, Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, was shown in Vancouver and Toronto from 2014 to 2015, while his first major solo exhibition in Europe, Bit Rot, was shown at Rotterdam's Kunstinstituut Melly as well as Munich’s Villa Stuck between 2015 and 2017. Coupland has also created numerous public art installations which have been integrated into Canada’s urban landscape. Some of his most famous works in this regard include his Digital Orca in Vancouver; as well as the various pieces created for Toronto’s Canoe Landing Park.
Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, a member of the Order of British Columbia, and a member of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Coupland has been long-listed twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for his Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.
Early life Coupland was born on December 30, 1961, at RCAF Station Baden-Soellingen in West Germany, the second of four sons of Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medical officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and C. Janet Coupland, a graduate in comparative religion from McGill University. In 1965, the Coupland family moved to West Vancouver, where Coupland's father opened a private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.
Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate".Wark, Penny."Trawling for Columbine". The Times, September 12th, 2003. "My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century to well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."
Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of (like his father) studying the sciences, specifically physics.Colman, David. "Take a Sharp Turn at Fiorucci". The New York Times, September 30, 2007. Coupland left McGill at the year's end and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.
At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I ... had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything."Jackson, Alan. "I didn't get where I am today without..." The Times, June 17, 2006. While there, Coupland formed lasting friendships with fellow students Angela Grossman, Attila Richard Lukacs, Derek Root, and Graham Gilmore, each of whom would go on to find their own recognition as artists.
Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the Hokkaido College of Art & Design in Sapporo, Japan and the Istituto Europeo di Design (European Design Institute) in Milan, Italy. He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.
Established as a designer and researcher working for Magazine House in Tokyo, Coupland developed a painful skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate; he reluctantly returned to Vancouver. Whilst still living in Japan, Coupland had been sending postcards to his friend back home. A mutual friend, the editor and journalist Malcolm Parry, happened to read one of Coupland’s postcards and, impressed by his writing ability, offered him a job at Vancouver Magazine, where Parry was then editor-in-chief. Following the success of Coupland’s first assignment, in which he reported on an art scandal involving Los Angeles gallerist Doug Christmas, the novice writer was given a regular monthly feature at the magazine. (The fourth of these feature articles would contain Coupland’s first ruminations on the generational malaise explored in his debut novel.)
Coupland had begun writing professionally as a means of paying his art studio bills, and it was during this same period that he mounted his first art exhibition. Called Floating World, the exhibition comprised a series of representational sculptures depicting oversized everyday objects. Floating World was hosted at the Vancouver Art Gallery from November 20, 1987 to January 28, 1988. Then 26 years old, Coupland was at that time one of the youngest artists to have received an exhibition at the VAG.
In 1988, Malcolm Parry (Coupland’s boss and mentor at Vancouver Magazine) was hired as editor of the newly launched–and ultimately short-lived–Vista Magazine in Toronto, and he brought Coupland along with him. While working for Vista, Coupland wrote a monthly comic strip, “Generation X,” which picked up on ideas he had first examined in an earlier feature article for Vancouver Magazine. Illustrated by cartoonist Paul Rivoche, the strip “told the story of young office workers, struggling to survive in a competitive office environment, where smug baby boomers had all the best jobs, and all the complacent attitude.” The strip attracted the notice of St. Martin’s, a New York-based publishing house, who advanced Coupland the sum of $USD22,500 to write a book based on the strip. Thus began Coupland’s long, prolific, and indeed unexpected, literary career.
Literary works
Generation X (1991) From 1989 to 1990, Coupland lived in the Mojave Desert working on a handbook about the birth cohort that followed the baby boom.Barker, Pat. "Behind the Lines". The Times, October 9, 2007. He had received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to write the nonfiction handbook. Instead, Coupland wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.Dafoe, Chris. "Carving a profile from a forgotten generation". The Globe and Mail, November 9, 1991. It was rejected in Canada before being accepted by an American publishing house in 1991.McLaren, Leah. "Birdman of BC". The Globe and Mail, September 28, 2006. Reflecting on the writing of his debut novel years later, Coupland said, "I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I'd sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn't happening in reality."
Not an instant success, the novel steadily increased in sales; eventually, the book attracted a following behind its core idea of "Generation X". Over his own protestations, Coupland was dubbed the spokesperson for a generation,Muro, Mark. "'Baby Busters' resent life in Boomers' debris". The Boston Globe, November 10, 1991. stating in 2006 "I was just doing what I do and people sort of stuck that on to me. It's not like I spend my days thinking that way." The terms Generation X and McJob, used by Coupland in the novel, ultimately entered the vernacular. Coupland described Gen X as those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which ironically are often considered younger baby boomer (Generation Jones) years.Mark Muro, "Baby Buster's Resent life in Boomers' Debris", The Boston Globe, November 10, 1991, City Edition In 1999, he described his book as being about "the fringe of Generation Jones which became the mainstream of Generation X."Generation Jones news website
Shampoo Planet (1992) Shampoo Planet was published by Pocket Books in 1992. It focused on the generation after Coupland's, the group called "Global Teens" in his first novel. Coupland defined Global Teens as those born in the mid-late 1960s and 1970s;Kate Muir, "To label lovers everywhere", The Times, August 17, 1992 ironically, this group later came to be known as Generation X in the media. Coupland permanently moved back to Vancouver soon after the novel was published. He had spent his "twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on [him] that Vancouver is the best one going".Coupland, Douglas. City of Glass
Life After God (1994) Coupland had written a collection of small books, which together were compiled, after the advice of his publisher, into the book Life After God. This collection of short stories, with its focus on spirituality, initially provoked polarized reaction before eventually revealing itself as a bellwether text for the avant-garde sensibility identified by Ferdinand Mount as "Christian post-Christian".
Microserfs (1995) In 1994, Coupland was working for the newly formed magazine Wired. While there, he wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation. This short work provided the inspiration for a novel, Microserfs. To research the culture that the novel depicted, Coupland had moved to Palo Alto, California and immersed himself in Silicon Valley life.Grimwood, Jon Courtenay. "Nerds of the cyberstocracy". The Independent, November 13, 1995 Microserfs was published in 1995.
Polaroids from the Dead (1996) Coupland followed Microserfs with his first collection of non-fiction pieces in 1996. Polaroids from the Dead is a manifold of stories and essays on diverse topics, including: Grateful Dead concerts; Harolding; Kurt Cobain's death; the visiting of a German reporter; and a comprehensive essay on Brentwood, California, written at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder case and the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.
Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) Also in 1996, Coupland was touring Europe to promote Microserfs. However, the high workload brought on fatigue and mental strain.Smith, Stephen. "Dictators and comas". [he Globe and Mail, March 14, 1998."Dealing with the X factor". The Age, July 30, 2005. He reportedly incorporated his experience with depression during this period into his novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland noted that this was his last novel to be "...written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations".Wheelwright, Julie. "Talking About Which Generation?" The Independent, February 12, 2000. Girlfriend in a Coma was published in 1998. That same year, Coupland contributed the short story "Fire at the Ativan Factory" to the collection Disco 2000; he also wrote the liner notes for Saint Etienne's album Good Humor.
Miss Wyoming (2000) In 2000, Coupland published the novel Miss Wyoming. A love story revolving around an ex-beauty queen/soap opera star and an ageing B-movie producer, Miss Wyoming was described as “his weirdest, most wonderful book so far,” with one reviewer remarking that “Coupland’s gift is to make you care about people who, in other people’s novels, would be incidental Aunt Sallys, people to blame or ridicule.”
City of Glass (2000)