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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published September 9, 2010

In the fall of 1977, an adolescent Jonathan Franzen, equipped with thick glasses and a head full of ideas, stepped onto the campus of Swarthmore College as a member of the Class of 1981 and declared himself a prospective physics major.

Thirty-three years later, Franzen’s face peers out of newsstands everywhere from the August 23 issue of Time magazine. His latest novel, “Freedom,” earned him this coveted spot, a place no American author has filled since Stephen King a decade ago, under the blaring headline: “Great American Novelist.”

With four other novels – one of which, “The Corrections,” earned him a National Book Award and a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist spot – and two works of nonfiction under his belt, Franzen is being singled out as one of the standout writers of his generation.

“My dad was an inveterate Time reader, so the cover was certainly something I’d always wanted,” Franzen said. “My first reaction when I heard I’d gotten it was to hope that the photographer, Dan Winters, had taken a decent picture – the shoot was done in my garage in Santa Cruz.”

Eventually majoring in German and minoring in English Literature, Franzen dabbled in many different areas of writing during his time at Swarthmore before settling down as a novelist after college. He not only wrote extensively as writer and co-editor for The Phoenix in his freshman year, but he also experimented with theater in a playwriting workshop and edited the literary magazine, Small Craft Warnings, during his senior year.

“He was still sorting himself out as a writer and as a person in those days,” said Tom Hjelm ’81, one of Franzen’s closest friends. “I think most of us were.”

At the age of 28, Franzen published his first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” inspired mostly by his work in a playwriting workshop class where he’d written ten pages of dialogue per week.

Thomas Crochunis ’81 was one of other students who took the workshop with Franzen. “I really enjoyed being in a class where I got to read his stuff every week. There was always an edge to it; there was always ambition,” he said.

Those most familiar with Franzen’s writing style through the years admire his facility with language. “He had a great sense of spoken language, and he had a great ear for dialogue,” Crochunis said. “That was actually one of the things that was great about him as a critic – I really trusted his ear.”

In several other courses at Swarthmore, including an Honors seminar on modern German prose, a Shakespeare seminar and a theory of literary criticism seminar, Swarthmore exposed Franzen to the types of literature that he neglected to pay attention to in high school.

“It was the place where I learned what literature could do,” he said.

Reading modern German prose gave Franzen “a glimpse of the enormous sophistication and complexity that is possible in a novel,” he said. More importantly though, his professor, the late George Avery, taught in a way that showed his students how much these German writers, including Kafka and Mann, really had at stake in the work they were doing.

“The reason we were still reading it was not that it was smart or complicated or required scholars to decipher it,” Franzen said. “The reason it lasted was that these were writers trying to figure out their own lives.”

Even beyond class and his extracurricular activities, Franzen made time to write for himself. “[In] freshman year, at one point he reserved one evening per week where he would only work on his own writing, so he was writing stories, he was writing plays, even at that early stage,” Hjelm said. “He had a lot of talent, but in some ways, he willed himself into being a great writer.”

Since graduating, Franzen has returned to campus numerous times for Alumni Weekend, lectures and speeches. In 1992 and 1994, he even came to Swarthmore to teach a creative writing workshop.

“I’ve taught at the graduate level at Columbia a few times and the 18-year-olds in the fiction workshop at Swarthmore were not only much better prose writers, but they were just all around smarter and harder working,” Franzen said. Franzen also remarked on another unique Swarthmore quality: “Swarthmore students are great at pretending to have much more knowledge than they actually possess,” he said. “You learn how to sound really smart even when you don’t know that much, and that’s actually a great gift to any novelist.”

Though Franzen found the academic environment of Swarthmore engaging, he generally felt uncomfortable and out of touch with the rest of the student body. It also did not help that he lived out in “the wilderness of Mary Lyon” during his first two years.

“It was kind of miserable at the time,” Franzen said, “But I’ve now made my life on the grumpy margins of the culture, and the readers I write for and the writers I feel close to are the ones who don’t really fit in.”

Class-mates and professors of Franzen remember a different illustration of this young writer. Art Zito ’81, who was in two of Franzen’s seminars, described him as personable and curious, while Hjelm described him as humorous, hard-working and sociable.

“He used to complain about not having enough friends, but he was the most social loner I knew,” Hjelm said.

Lucy McDiarmid, Franzen’s Shakespeare professor and now a professor at Montclair State University, especially enjoyed his presence in her seminar. “He was very thoughtful in both senses of the word, a kind person, and someone who was full of ideas. Even when he was silent, he was thinking hard behind those thick glasses, which seemed to create a kind of privacy for him,” she said.

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