Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977) is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer, and Esther Safran Foer, the Polish-born president of a public-relations company. Jonathan was one of three sons in his tight-knit Jewish family; his older brother Franklin is now the editor of The New Republic and his younger brother Joshua is a freelance journalist.

Jonathan was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child, and at the age of 8 was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years", during which "He wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin." Foer attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University. In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton, Foer took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in Foer's writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy". Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way.

And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran, whom Jonathan never met. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.

Similar to 0 things you like: