Background

Justin Cronin was born in 1962 in New York state, United States. His family was from Massachusetts. His father worked in White Plains.

Education

Justin Cronin went to school in Westchester County, north of New York City. He attended Andover and Harvard University, where he got a C-plus in a creative writing class, one of the worst grades of his college career. But there was still something about writing, or maybe just the idea of being a writer, that intrigued him. When his sister gave him a copy of one of the Best American Short Stories volumes, he noticed that many of the authors had attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That was good enough for Cronin. At Iowa, Cronin started to figure out what kind of writer he wanted to be. "I was not conforming to the dominant paradigm of the moment," - he said, which was mostly very short stories "written with despair." Rather, he wanted to write the kinds of books that turned him into a reader as a child. "All the books that made me want to be a writer, in hindsight, were the ones with the big plots: big stories, people in trouble, running from bad things." Justin Cronin received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1984; a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1989.

Career

For a couple of years, Justin Cronin was a high school teacher. He worked at the University of Memphis as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English in 1990-1991. He was an Associate Professor of English at La Salle University in 1992-2003. He has begun the career at Rice University as an Associate Professor of English (2003-2007), then becoming a Professor of English (2007-2009) and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Humanities (2012-2016). He is a Writer In Residence since 2016.

He was a co-producer of "The Passage" thriller television series based on his book trilogy. The seed of the idea for The Passage Trilogy came from his daughter, who was 8 at the time and asked him to write a story about a girl who would save the world. With The Passage, Cronin wanted to do something on a massive, genre-bending scale but still focus on the lives of everyday people, as well as draw on everything he'd learned as an artist, a husband, and a father.

Achievements

• In 2010, Justin Cronin's book The Passage was a phenomenon. The unforgettable tale that critics and readers compared to the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Margaret Atwood became a runaway bestseller and enchanted readers around the globe. It spent 3 months on The New York Times bestseller list. It was featured on more than a dozen "Best of the Year" lists, including Time's "Top 10 Fiction of 2010," NPR's "Year's Most Transporting Books," and Esquire's "Best & Brightest of 2010." It was the number-one Indie Next Selection. It sold in over 40 countries and became a bestseller in many of them. Stephen King called The Passage "enthralling...read this book and the ordinary world disappears." He also received several awards for his books.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Summer Guest

    (With a rare combination of emotional insight, narrative p...)

    2004
  • The City of Mirrors

    (The City of Mirrors is the third book of The Passage Tril...)

  • The Passage

    (The Passage is the first book of The Passage Trilogy. An ...)

    2010
  • The Twelve

    (The Twelve is the second book of The Passage Trilogy. In ...)

    2012
  • Mary and O'Neil

    (Mary and O'Neil: They are like any other couple. They hav...)

    2001

Views

For Justin Cronin, writing is a reflection of living, which makes it a marathon, not a sprint. "You just need to have some mileage on your odometer," - he said.

Quotations: "Don't reach over your head at the start. Write a book that someone would want to read, period. You'll get better, and you'll know more, and your fiction will become richer. But don't say "I want to write Chekhov" when you're 20 years old. You can't."

Personality

Justin Cronin doesn't have so many favorite writers, as he has favorite books, ones that have helped him in the formulation of his own. For instance, The Passage drew a great deal of thought and energy from Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. The Twelve drew a lot of its thinking from George Orwell's 1984. That was a very important book in Justin Cronin's education as a writer, too.

Interests

• Writers

  William Shakespeare, George Orwell

Connections

Justin Cronin is married; he has a daughter named Iris and a son. He met his wife at the University of Iowa as she was a student there.

Daughter:

Iris Cronin

References

• Justin Cronin