When The Corrections was published in the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen was probably better known for his nonfiction than for the two novels he had already published. In an essay he wrote for Harper’s in 1996, Franzen lamented the declining cultural authority of the American novel and described his personal search for reasons to persist as a fiction writer. Five years later, The Corrections became an international bestseller and won Franzen the National Book Award. Franzen’s most recent novel, Freedom, was published in 2010. In August of that year, Franzen was featured on the cover of Time magazine–only the second time in the last decade that a living writer has been on the cover of this national magazine. Freedom debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was chosen later that year as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010.

George Saunders is a professor of English in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and teaches in the college’s Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the short story collections “Pastoralia,”“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “In Persuasion Nation,” among numerous other works. Saunders’ work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ and Harpers Magazine. Writing for GQ, he has traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton, reported on Nepal ‘s “Buddha Boy,” driven the length of the Mexican border, spent a week in the theme hotels of Dubai, and lived incognito in a homeless tent city in Fresno, Calif. In 2006, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.