Stephen Chbosky

Stephen Chbosky, born January 25, 1970, is an American author, screenwriter, and film director whose work has often centered on young people trying to understand themselves and the people around them. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Upper St. Clair Township, the son of Lea, a tax preparer, and Fred G. Chbosky, a steel company executive and consultant to CFOs. Raised Catholic, he grew up with a taste for “a good blend of the classics, horror, and fantasy,” a mix that would later appear in the range of his writing.

As a teenager, Chbosky was strongly influenced by J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, as well as the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams. He graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1988. Around that time, he met Stewart Stern, the screenwriter of the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. Stern became a close friend and mentor, and Chbosky has credited him with inspiring him to become a writer.

Chbosky graduated in 1992 from the University of Southern California’s Filmic Writing screenwriting program. In 1995, he wrote, directed, and acted in the independent film The Four Corners of Nowhere, which was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, helped him get his first agent, and became one of the first films shown on the Sundance Channel. In the late 1990s, he also wrote several unproduced screenplays, including Audrey Hepburn’s Neck and Schoolhouse Rock.

He is best known for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his 1999 bestselling coming-of-age novel. The book began, in part, with a line he wrote while working on a different kind of book: “I guess that’s just one of the perks of being a wallflower.” Chbosky later said that somewhere in that sentence was the kid he had been trying to find. The novel follows a teenager using the alias Charlie through his first year of high school, and Chbosky has described it as semi-autobiographical while noting that his own high school life was different in many ways. The book became especially popular with teenage readers, sold more than 700,000 copies by 2007, and had more than two million copies in print by May 2013. It also drew controversy for its portrayals of teen sexuality and drug use and appeared repeatedly on the American Library Association’s lists of the 10 most frequently challenged books.

Chbosky later moved across film and television with steady range. He edited the 2000 anthology Pieces, wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film adaptation of Rent, and served as co-creator, executive producer, and writer of the CBS drama Jericho, which premiered in 2006. He wrote and directed the 2012 film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Ezra Miller; the film earned him a Writers Guild Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. He also worked on Disney’s 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast, directed Wonder in 2017, and directed the 2021 film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen.

In 2019, Chbosky published Imaginary Friend, his first psychological horror novel and second novel overall; it debuted as a Top 10 New York Times Best Seller. Across his books and films, his best-known work has returned to friendship, fear, family, adolescence, and the need to be seen clearly. That is why readers continue to find their way to his pages, especially those who recognize something of Charlie’s watchfulness, uncertainty, and longing to belong.