Jonathan Franzen: 2011 Heartland Prize for Fiction

Beginning with his 2001 novel, The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has been celebrated as one of the most perceptive and talented chroniclers of contemporary American life. In Freedom, Franzen delves into the heart of one complicated Minnesota family. Walter and Patty Berglund's middle-aged growing pains—the messiness of love found and lost, roads taken and not—is, in the words of one critic, an "indelible portrait of our times" and earned him a nomination for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The winner of the National Book Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize in fiction for The Corrections, Franzen is also the author of The Discomfort Zone (memoir), How to Be Alone (essays), and the novels Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City.