Dan Chaon (born June 11, 1964) is an American writer. Formerly a creative writing professor, he is the author of three short story collections and four novels.
Early life and education
Chaon was born June 11, 1964, in either Sidney, Nebraska[1][2] or Omaha, Nebraska,[3] and was the adopted son of Earl D. Chaon and Teresa N. (Tallmage) Chaon. His father was a construction worker and his mother a stay-at-home mom, neither of whom graduated from high school. He was the oldest of three siblings. He grew up in a village of 20 people outside of Sidney, Nebraska.[1][3][4][5][6]
Chaon has said about his childhood, "I was a weird kid: bookish, imaginative, and not athletic." He was a voracious young reader: "At 10, I wanted to read The New Yorker." Foreshadowing some themes of his later writing, he noted, "I grew up on a steady diet of SF and horror and ghost stories, and that’s still a love of mine," and that as a teenager he "was fascinated by the serial killer novels that were popular" in the 1980s. Furthermore, he said, "I've written stories since I was a little kid." He credits his parents for their support: "I had parents who, however puzzled they were by my weirdness, were tolerant of it and loving."[5][6][7]
As a thirteen-year-old, expanding on an assignment from his "really wonderful" seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Christy, Chaon wrote a fan letter to Ray Bradbury, and enclosed some of his own stories, "which were slavish imitations of Ray Bradbury stories." Chaon said, "The amazing thing was that Bradbury actually wrote back to me, praising the stories and offering a critique. Bradbury was full of kindness and hyperbole and told me that he thought I would soon be published. . . . This is when I decided that I was going to be a writer." Their correspondence continued for several years. Chaon credits Bradbury's encouragement for enabling his own writing career: "I happened upon a particularly generous spirit in Ray Bradbury, whose kindness put me on a track I might not have had the confidence to pursue otherwise."[5][6]
Chaon earned a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, where he originally intended to be a film major, in 1986. His professors at Northwestern included Sheila Schwartz, whom he would later marry, and Reginald Gibbons, whom he described as a "lifelong mentor" and who later published Chaon's first book. He went on to earn a master's degree from Syracuse University, where he studied with Tobias Wolff, in 1990.[1][5][6]
Employment
After his family moved to the Cleveland area in 1990 when his wife was appointed to a teaching position at Cleveland State University, Chaon worked as a stay-at-home father and took on a number of odd jobs, such as catering, bartending, construction, and work as an administrative assistant, until 1996 when his first short-story collection, Fitting Ends, was published.[8][5]
His first collection was Fitting Ends and Other Stories, published in 1996.
Chaon's second collection of short stories, Among the Missing, was published in 2001. It was named as one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association, and as a notable book of the year by The New York Times.
His first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was published in 2004.
A second novel, Await Your Reply, was published in 2009.
His third short story collection, Stay Awake, published in 2012, was a finalist for The Story Prize.[15]
In 2022, Chaon published his fourth novel, Sleepwalk. He read from it on Storybound (podcast). Reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, Joshua Ferris described the book as a "comic departure from the straightforward darkness of recent Chaon." He wrote that the book's plot was "Pynchonian" and "baroque", adding that "What prevails above the plot is the voice, which is consistently winning and — odd for so bloody a tale — unfailingly warm."[22]
Website Controversy
Chaon wrote in The Atlantic, in November 2022, that his former website, danchaon.com, had been taken over by someone else who posted a fake "official website of the writer" there, and he had been unable to remove it.[23]
In about the mid-1990s, Chaon met his biological father through a DNA registry. He later said that, because his adoptive father was a construction worker and different in nature from Chaon, "I had this whole image of, if I were to ever find my biological parents, they would be very artistic. But my biological father is a construction worker—he's an electrician!"[5]
Chaon married the writer Sheila Schwartz either in 1988[24] or on June 4, 1989.[citation needed] The two met when he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student at Northwestern, and she was his thirty-year-old writing professor. They were married for twenty years until her death of ovarian cancer in November 2008.[25] They have two sons, Philip Chaon and Paul Chaon.[26]
Fitting Ends and Other Stories (TriQuarterly/Northwestern U. Press, 1995), reprinted 2003 by Ballantine Books, with two additional stories, as Fitting Ends
“Fitting Ends,” in Best American Short Stories 1996, ed. John Edgar Wideman and Katrina Kenison (1996)
“The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom,” in The Pushcart Prize 24: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (2000)
“Big Me,” in 2001 O. Henry Prize Stories [second-place story], ed. Larry Dark (2001)
"Seven Types of Ambiguity," in The Pushcart Prize 26: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (2002)
“I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me,” in The Pushcart Prize 27: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (2003)
"The Bees," in Best American Short Stories 2003, ed. John Edgar Wideman and Katrina Kenison (2003)
"Shepherdess," in The Pushcart Prize 32: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (2008)
"Little America," in Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, ed. Sam Weller & Mort Castle (2012)
(Of these eight stories, the first was included in *Fitting Ends and Other Stories; the second, third, and fifth in Among the Missing; and the sixth and seventh in Stay Awake.)
