Jonathan Safran Foer

About Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer was born February 21, 1977, in Washington, D.C., and studied philosophy at Princeton University, where a senior thesis about a Holocaust survivor became the seed of his first novel. After a brief stint at medical school, he turned to writing full-time and later taught in New York University's graduate creative writing program. He has also written nonfiction examining industrialized animal agriculture and climate change, alongside his fiction.

Novels of Inherited Memory

Foer's debut, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), follows a young American searching Ukraine for the woman who may have saved his grandfather during the Holocaust, blending a present-day quest with an invented history of a vanished shtetl. The novel won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was adapted into a 2005 film. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), follows nine-year-old Oskar Schell as he searches New York City for the lock that matches a key left by his father, who died in the September 11 attacks. Both novels use formal experimentation — invented language, fractured chronology, unconventional typography — to approach grief that resists straightforward narration, and both were adapted into major films.

Book Challenges

Both of Foer's novels have drawn formal objections in schools and libraries, generally centered on explicit sexual content and frequent coarse language rather than their historical subject matter. Some challengers have also objected to the dark comic tone Everything Is Illuminated takes toward genocide, arguing it treats serious material too irreverently for younger readers. Between the two titles, Foer's work is recorded in this catalog as challenged or restricted across 9 states and 29 districts, making him one of the more frequently banned literary novelists tracked here relative to the small size of his catalog.