Maps and Legends

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" pens a work of literary non-fiction--a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing.

An American novelist and short-story writer, Michael Chabon was born in Washington, D.C., in 1963. The son of a pediatrician and a lawyer, Chabon grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and spent his summers with his father in Pittsburgh. Chabon received his B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985, and went on to get his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California at Irvine. Chabon found success at the age of twenty-four, when William Morrow publishing house offered him $155,000, a near-record sum, for the rights to his first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was Chabon's thesis in graduate school. After Pittsburgh became a national best-seller, Chabon began writing a series of short stories about a little boy dealing with his parents' divorce. The stories, which in part appeared in The New Yorker and G.Q., were bound together in 1991 into a volume titled A Model World And Other Stories. Chabon has also written articles for The New York Times and Vogue. Chabon lives in Los Angeles.