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Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, ''Gun, with Occasional Music'', a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published ''Motherless Brooklyn'', a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published ''The Fortress of Solitude'', which became a ''New York Times'' Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. ==Early life== Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter.〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=医療の不思議 )〕 He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Jonathan Lethem · Diary: My Egyptian Cousin: Saad Eddin Ibrahim · LRB 12 December 2002 )〕 His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching.〔McGlone, Jackie. ("Brooklyn Dodger" ), ''The Scotsman'', 2007-05-26. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.〕 He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw ''Star Wars'' twenty-one times during its original theatrical release,〔Edemariam, Aida. ("The Borrower" ), ''The Guardian'', 2007-06-02. Retrieved on 2007-08-01.〕 and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."〔Middlehurst, Charlotte. ("Jonathan Lethem to Appear in Shanghai ), ''Time Out Shanghai'' (September 26, 2011)〕 His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor,〔Lethem (2005). pp. 36-37.〕 an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary ''Complete Unknown''.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing ()—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."〔 Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish".〔("Interview: Jonathan Lethem" ), ''Post Road Magazine,'' Fall/Winter 2002. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.〕 At Music & Art he produced his own zine, ''The Literary Exchange,'' which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, ''Heroes'', still unpublished. After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor....at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege."〔 This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado to Berkeley, California in 1984, across "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done."〔Kelleghan, Fiona. ("Private Hells and Radical Doubts: An Interview with Jonathan Lethem" ), ''Science Fiction Studies'' 25.2, July 1998. Retrieved on 2007-09-17〕 Lethem lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time.〔("License at the Margins" ), ''California Magazine'', June 2010. Retrieved on 2010-07-04.〕 Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.〔Houle, Zachary. ("A Conversation With Jonathan Lethem" ), ''The SF Site'', November 2000. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jonathan Lethem」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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