Dan Sullivan

As Shaw put it, "A man becomes a critic by accident. But when the accident happens, it happens to a journalist."
That's what happened to me. One afternoon in 1962, my editor at the Minneapolis Tribune called me into his office to say that he was making me the paper's new theater critic. "Think you can handle that?"

Despite his brush with Oprah, Jonathan Franzen continues on course. "The Corrections" has just come out in soft cover, his first two novels, "The Twenty-Seventh City" (1988) and "Strong Motion" (1992), are still in print, and now we have a collection of non-fiction pieces to show his take on what he calls "the real world."