John Green

John Michael Green, born August 24, 1977, in Indianapolis, Indiana, is an American author and YouTuber whose career grew with two strong currents of the early twenty-first century: the boom in young adult fiction and the rise of online video. Raised largely in Orlando, Florida, after early family moves to Michigan and Alabama, he later attended Indian Springs School outside Birmingham. Green has said that although he had a happy childhood, he was not always a happy child, and he has spoken openly about severe anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and being bullied in high school.

Green studied at Kenyon College in Ohio, graduating in 2000 with a double major in English and religious studies. After college, he spent about six months as a student chaplain at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus while enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School, though he never actually attended the school. He had intended to become an Episcopal priest, but working with children facing life-threatening illness and injury made him reconsider that path. Parts of that experience later helped shape his writing, including The Fault in Our Stars.

In 2001, Green began working at the book review journal Booklist in Chicago, first as an editorial assistant and later as a production editor. He reviewed hundreds of books and wrote radio essays for NPR’s All Things Considered and WBEZ. At Booklist, author Ilene Cooper encouraged him to write a novel and mentored him through drafts. His debut, Looking for Alaska, was published in 2005 and won the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award. He followed it with An Abundance of Katherines in 2006.

On January 1, 2007, Green and his younger brother Hank launched the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, posting video blogs to each other on alternating weekdays. From that project grew Nerdfighteria, an active online community, and Project for Awesome, an annual telethon-style fundraiser. Green moved back to Indianapolis in 2007 and published Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances with Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle in 2008, Paper Towns the same year, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson with David Levithan in 2010. With Hank, he also helped launch VidCon and the educational channel Crash Course.

Green’s 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars became a massive commercial and critical success, as did its 2014 film adaptation. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, and his rapid rise and distinctive voice are credited with creating a major shift in the young adult fiction market. Later work became more direct about his anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, including Turtles All the Way Down and The Anthropocene Reviewed, which began as a podcast in 2018 and became his first nonfiction book in 2021. Since the mid-2010s, Green has also been a prominent advocate for global health causes, including work with Partners In Health and efforts against tuberculosis. His words continue to find readers because they come from close attention to fear, illness, friendship, learning, and the real lives of young people.