Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and nonfiction writer whose work grew out of the literary culture of the early twenty-first century, with its interest in memory, family history, formal experiment, and public crisis. Born on February 21, 1977, in Washington, D.C., he was raised in a Jewish family as the middle of three sons. His father, Albert Foer, was a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute. His mother, Esther Safran Foer, was born in Poland to Holocaust survivors and later became Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.

Foer’s childhood and family history gave him some of the subjects that would return in his fiction. He was described as a “flamboyant” and sensitive child, and at age 8 he was injured in a classroom chemical accident. The aftermath, in his account, was “something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years,” a period in which he “wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin.” He attended Georgetown Day School, and in 1994 traveled to Israel with other North American Jewish teenagers through a Bronfman youth fellowships program.

At Princeton University, Foer studied philosophy and found an early champion in Joyce Carol Oates, who taught an introductory writing course he took as a freshman in 1995. Oates told him he had “that most important of writerly qualities, energy,” and Foer later said she was the first person who made him think he should try to write seriously. He graduated from Princeton in 1999 with an A.B. in philosophy. His creative writing senior thesis examined the life of his maternal grandfather, Holocaust survivor Louis Safran, and won Princeton’s Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.

That thesis became the basis for Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002 after he traveled to Ukraine to expand the work. The novel earned a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award, and in 2005 it was adapted into a film written and directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood. Foer followed it with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in 2005, a novel about 9-year-old Oskar Schell dealing with the death of his father in the World Trade Center. The book used visual writing, photographs, linked storylines, and a 14-page flipbook, drawing both praise and sharp criticism. It, too, was made into a film, produced by Scott Rudin and directed by Stephen Daldry.

Foer’s later work widened his range. He wrote the libretto for Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2005. He published Eating Animals in 2009, a New York Times bestseller about factory farming, ethics, and the stories people tell through food choices. He later published Tree of Codes in 2010, edited The New American Haggadah in 2012 with a translation by Nathan Englander, released the novel Here I Am in 2016, and published We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast in 2019. He has taught creative writing at Yale as a visiting professor and, as of 2021, teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.

Foer is also known for his public views on eating animals and the meat industry. An occasional vegetarian since age 10, he recorded narration in 2006 for the documentary If This is Kosher..., and Eating Animals grew from questions he had long held about meat, sharpened by the birth of his first child. After the COVID-19 pandemic, he repeated his argument that Americans should eat less meat because of the industry’s social, environmental, and humanitarian consequences. His books continue to matter because they join private grief, family memory, moral choice, and formal risk, asking readers to consider how stories shape what people remember, eat, and pass on.