Writer and essayist Jonathan Franzen came to fame with his third novel The Corrections, published in 2001. The Corrections has been heralded as a timely and astute prediction of the frantic, cynical and anxious mood that would dominate American culture following the 9/11 attacks the following year.
The novel focuses on a dysfunctional family: two elderly parents try to maintain their lives and relationship in the face of dementia, while their three adult children each struggle to make sense of their childhood baggage in their current lives. The story won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002.
Controversially, Franzen rejected Oprah Winfrey's praise of the book, saying that it might actually hurt the novel's readership by making adult male readers less inclined to read it. This led to a feud between the two celebrities and Oprah publicly disinviting Franzen from her show. The two later seemed to reconcile when Winfrey selected Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom for her book club, and Franzen appeared on Winfrey's show.
