Jonathan Allen Lethem ( born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College. In 2025, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, a prestigious honor recognizing exceptional artists and scholars in the arts and humanities.
Early life Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist involved in the early New York hip hop scene, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in Brooklyn, in the northern section of the neighborhood of Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Lethem's fourth grade teacher at P.S. 29 in nearby Cobble Hill was future New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, whom he called the "perfect" teacher and to whom he dedicated his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching.McGlone, Jackie. , The Scotsman, 2007-05-26. Retrieved on 2007-08-29. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars 21 times during its original theatrical release,Edemariam, Aida. "The Borrower", The Guardian, 2007-06-02. Retrieved on 2007-08-01. and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick's work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."Middlehurst, Charlotte. "Jonathan Lethem to Appear in Shanghai, Time Out Shanghai (September 26, 2011)
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor,Lethem (2005). pp. 36-37. an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish"."Interview: Jonathan Lethem" , Post Road Magazine, Fall/Winter 2002. Retrieved on 2007-08-29. At Music & Art, he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming. ... collision with the realities of class—my parents' bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor. ... at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege." This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado, to Berkeley, California, in 1984, across "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket", describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done."Kelleghan, Fiona. "Private Hells and Radical Doubts: An Interview with Jonathan Lethem", Science Fiction Studies 25.2, July 1998. Retrieved on 2007-09-17
Lethem lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time."License at the Margins" , California Magazine, June 2010. Retrieved on 2010-07-04. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.Houle, Zachary. "A Conversation With Jonathan Lethem", The SF Site, November 2000. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
Career
First novels Lethem's first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd pictured my first novels being published as paperback originals", he recalled, "and instead a prestigious house was doing the book in cloth. ... I was in heaven." The novel was released to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel", catapulted the book to wider commercial success.Gaffney, Elizabeth. "Jonathan Lethem: Breaking the Barriers Between Genres", Publishers Weekly, 1998-03-30. Retrieved on 2007-09-19. Gun, with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine reader's poll. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.
His next book was Amnesia Moon (1995). Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country, this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, Lethem published his third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table (1997). It starts with a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly, constitute the majority of the narrative.
In 1996, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders. Lethem has said that Girl in Landscapes plot and characters, including the figures of a young girl and a violently protective father figure, were "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which he is "obsessed".Lethem, Jonathan. "Breeding Hybrids in the Genre Garden", Locus Magazine, October 1997. Retrieved on 2007-09-19.
Mainstream success and "genre bending"
The first novel Lethem began after returning to New York City was Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme. He maintained objective realism while exploring subjective alterity through Lionel Essrog. His protagonist has Tourette's syndrome and is obsessed with language. Lethem later said that Essrog
... obviously [is] the character I've written with whom I most identify ... [the novel] stands outside myself ... It's the only one which doesn't need me, never did. It would have found someone to write it, by necessity.
Upon its publication in 1999, Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award; it was named book of the year by Esquire. In 1999, actor Edward Norton announced that he was planning to write, direct and star in a film adaptation of the novel.Fleming, Michael. "Norton Birthing 'Motherless': New Line Nurturing Lethem Novel", Variety, 1999-10-13. Retrieved on 2007-08-29. Norton's film was released in 2019.
According to The New York Times, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster celebrity", and he was referred to several times as a "genre bender".Cardwell, Diane. "Untangling the Knots of a Brooklyn Boyhood", The New York Times, 2003-09-16. Retrieved on 2008-03-28. Critics cited the variety of Lethem's novels, which were alternately hard-boiled detective fiction, science fiction, and autobiographical. Lethem credited his comfort in genre-mixing to his father's art, which "always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously." In Time magazine, Lev Grossman classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon (with whom Lethem is friends),Henderson, Eleanor. "From Pittsburgh to Sitka: On Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union" (book review), The Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-28. Margaret Atwood, and Susanna Clarke.
In 2003, Lethem commented on the concept of "genre bending":
The fact is, I used to get very involved, six or seven years ago, and before that, in questions of taxonomy of genre, and in the idea—which is ultimately a political idea—that a given writer, perhaps me, could in some objective way alter or reorganize the boundaries between genres. ... Nowadays, I've come to feel that talking about categories, about "high" and "low", about genre and their boundaries and the blurring of those boundaries, all consists only of an elaborate way to avoid actually discussing what moves and interests me about books—my own, and others'. What I like are books in their homely actuality—the insides of the books, the mysterious movements of characters and situations and the emotions that accompany those movements. The play of sentences, their infinite variety."Jonathan Lethem Interview" , FailBetter.com, Summer/Fall 2003. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000). This Shape We're In was one of the first offerings from McSweeney's Books, the publishing imprint that developed from Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.
In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003 as The Fortress of Solitude. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman features dozens of characters in a variety of milieus, but features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill. It was named one of nine "Editor's Choice" books of the year by The New York Times and has been published in fifteen languages.
Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In March 2005, The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was released. On September 20, 2005, Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship.
In an interview with Armchair/Shotgun in 2009, Lethem said of short fiction: