About Jennifer Egan

American novelist Jennifer Egan was born September 7th, 1962 in Chicago, Illinois. When she was seven, her parents divorced and she went to live with her mother in San Francisco, California, visiting her father back in Chicago during the summers. Egan attended the University of Pennsylvania, originally planning to major in archaeology but switching to creative writing after experiencing an uneventful archaeological dig after she graduated high school. During her time at UPenn, she was in a long distance relationship with young inventor and future CEO of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, who gave her a Macintosh computer. In her senior year, Egan won the Thouron Award which enabled her to study at Cambridge University in England after graduating.

After Cambridge, Egan travelled to China, the Soviet Union, and Italy before settling in New York City. In New York, Egan worked as a temp, a word processor, and-most unusually-the private secretary of Spanish-American aristorat, the Countess of Romanones. Realizing that she had forgotten the things she had learned at Penn State, Egan sought the tutelage of poet and writing instructor, Phillip Schultz, to help her write her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1995).

Egan went on to publish The Invisible Circus as well as other novels such as Look At Me (2001) and The Keep (2006). While doing research for Look At Me, a story about a young fashion model in New York City, Egan wrote a story on the same topic for the New York Times. This introduced her to journalism, now she is often published in The New York Times Magazine.

In 2010, she published her most recent novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. A Visit from the Goon Squad became her most successful endeavor yet, winning the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.