CCCS Remembering Childhood Lecture Series
presented

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize
winning novel, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay,
which chronicles the rise of two Jewish cousins
who write comic books during the "Golden Age" in the late '30s and '40s.

Michael Chabon , the third author in the CCCS Remembering Childhood: Meet The Authors, Hear Their Stories Lecture Series held in the Rutgers-Camden Gordon Theater, captivated his audience with stories of his own literary development. In 1988 Michael Chabon published the novel he had written for his master's thesis. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a critical sensation and the most talked about novel of the year — not bad for a twenty-something grad student. After a successful collection of stories, the "young star of American letters" set to work on an ambitious second novel called Fountain City. A bit too ambitious. Chabon could never quite pull the story together and eventually abandoned the project in favor of a story about a failed academic having problems finding the ending for a too-ambitious second novel. Wonder Boys had all the virtues of his first novel — charming characters, flawless prose, playful wit — with an additional dose of world-weary adult cynicism. Still, though an excellent effort by any standard, Wonder Boys didn't quite meet the expectations of Chabon's greatest admirers. His third novel far exceeded them.

At the heart of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two cousins who forge a comic book empire in forties New York. What's so extraordinary about Chabon's novel is how much ground he is able to cover. Sprawling across several decades and a handful of continents — from war-torn Prague to New York City, California, and even Antarctica — Chabon's remarkable characters provide a virtual tour through the classic themes of the human experience: good, evil, romance, friendship, longing, despair — the whole package. Like all artists, Chabon accesses the power of the universal through the idiosyncrasies of the particular.

Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, chronicles the rise of two Jewish cousins who write comic books during the "Golden Age" in the late '30s and '40s. (From: Powels.com)