Early Life and Education
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the son of Irene (née Super) and Earl T. Franzen. His father, raised in Minnesota, was of Swedish descent. Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in German in 1981. As part of his undergraduate education, he studied abroad in Germany during the 1979-80 academic year with Wayne State University's Junior Year in Munich program. Here he met Michael A. Martone, on whom the character Walter Berglund would one day be based. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin in Berlin in 1981-82. From these experiences, he speaks fluent German. Upon graduation Franzen got married and moved with his wife to Boston to pursue a career as a novelist. When this plan fell through, they moved to New York, in 1987, where Franzen managed to sell his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.
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