Michael Chabon, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is the winner of the 2008 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. Since 1988, Chabon has written five novels, a novella, two collections of short stories, a young-adult novel, numerous articles and essays, and several screenplays and teleplays, including sharing story credit for “Spider-Man 2.” He writes a regular column for the magazine Details.
Chabon is considered by many critics as one of the major literary authors of his generation. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Chabon is a flat-out wonderful writer – evocative and inventive, pointed and poignant.” The Los Angeles Times Book Review said, “A loving craftsman and author of superb, seemingly alchemically rendered sentences, Chabon has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling, fiction.”
Chabon believes that three things are required for success as a novelist: talent, luck and discipline. He says, “Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”