Editing Jonathan Franzen (section)

=== Early novels ===
[[File:Jonathan Franzen, Author 1988.jpg|thumb|upright|Franzen in 1988]]
''[[The Twenty-Seventh City]]'', published in 1988, is set in Franzen's hometown, St. Louis, and deals with the city's fall from grace, St. Louis having been the "fourth city" in the 1870s. This sprawling novel was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch.<ref>[http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1992/01/20/terra-not-so-firma.html Laura Shapiro, "Terra Not So Firma," Newsweek, January 20, 1992.] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120725102157/http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1992/01/20/terra-not-so-firma.html |date=July 25, 2012 }} (Shapiro: "A huge and masterly drama of St. Louis under siege, gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing." Shapiro also noted The Twenty-Seventh City's "brilliance," and the author's "prodigious gifts," concluding, "The news that he is at work on a third [novel] is welcome indeed."]</ref> In a conversation with novelist [[Donald Antrim]] for ''[[Bomb (magazine)|Bomb Magazine]]'', Franzen described ''The Twenty-Seventh City'' as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns",<ref>Antrim, Donald. [http://bombsite.com/issues/77/articles/2437 "Jonathan Franzen"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110814053258/http://bombsite.com/issues/77/articles/2437 |date=August 14, 2011 }}. ''[[Bomb (magazine)|Bomb Magazine]]''. Fall 2001. Retrieved July 27, 2011.</ref> adding in a later interview "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."<ref name="theparisreview.org">{{cite journal|url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/the-art-of-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen|title=Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207|journal=The Paris Review|author=Stephen J. Burn|date=Winter 2010|volume=Winter 2010|issue=195|access-date=January 21, 2011|archive-date=October 31, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121031005440/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6054/the-art-of-fiction-no-207-jonathan-franzen|url-status=live}}</ref>

''[[Strong Motion]]'' (1992) focuses mainly on a [[dysfunctional family]], the Hollands, and uses [[Seismology|seismic]] events on the American East Coast as a metaphor for the quakes that occur in family life (as Franzen put it, "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other."<ref name="theparisreview.org"/>). A '[[systems novel]]', the key 'systems' of ''Strong Motion'' according to Franzen are "... the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world."<ref name="theparisreview.org"/> The novel was not a financial success at the time of its publication. Franzen subsequently defended the novel in his 2010 Paris Review interview, remarking "I think they [critics and readers] may be overlooking ''Strong Motion'' a little bit."<ref name="theparisreview.org"/>

Franzen taught a fiction-writing seminar at [[Swarthmore College|Swarthmore]] in the spring of 1992 and 1994:
{{Blockquote
|text= On that first day of class, Franzen wrote two words on the blackboard: "truth" and "beauty," and told his students that these were the goals of fiction. Haslett describes Franzen's classroom manner as "serious." "He meant what he said and didn't suffer fools gladly." But this seriousness was leavened by a "great relish for words and writing," adds Kathleen Lawton-Trask '96, a 1994 workshop student who is now a writer and high school English teacher. "People who teach fiction workshops aren't always starry-eyed about writing, but he was. He read our stories so closely that he often started class with a rundown of words that were not used quite correctly in stories from that week's workshop. (I still remember him explaining to us the difference between cement and concrete.) At the same time, he was eminently supportive and sympathetic; I don't remember those corrections ever feeling condescending."<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Wachter |first=Paul |date=April 2011 |title=Six Degrees of Jonathan Franzen |url=https://bulletin.swarthmore.edu/bulletin-issue-archive/archive_p=635.html |magazine=Swarthmore College Bulletin |access-date=2019-07-12 |archive-date=July 13, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190713020627/https://bulletin.swarthmore.edu/bulletin-issue-archive/archive_p%3D635.html |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

For the 1992 class, Franzen invited [[David Foster Wallace]] to be a guest judge of the workshop pieces.