Michael Chabon is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation," according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys, and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. 

May 24th, 1963 in Washington, D.C. (Age 61)