Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides has been filmed, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.

Biography

Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a father of Greek descent and a mother of English and Irish ancestry. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School and took his undergraduate degree at Brown University (where he became friends with contemporary Rick Moody), graduating in 1983 after taking a year off to travel across Europe and to volunteer with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. Of his decision to study at Brown, Eugenides later remarked "I chose Brown largely in order to study with John Hawkes, whose work I admired. I entered the honors program in English, which forced me to study the entire English tradition, beginning with Beowulf. I felt that since I was going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know something about it." He later earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University.