The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
novel by Michael Chabon
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a 1988 novel by American author Michael Chabon. It is a coming-of-age tale set during the early 1980s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It was Chabon's first novel, which he began writing as a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. He continued to work on it during his studies (1985–87) in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he submitted it as his thesis for the Master of Fine Arts degree. One of his advisors, the novelist MacDonald Harris, sent it to his literary agent. It was published in 1988 and became a bestseller.
A film adaptation starring Jon Foster, Sienna Miller, Peter Sarsgaard, and Nick Nolte was released in 2009.
Plot summary
Art Bechstein is the son of a mob money launderer, who wants him to succeed in a legitimate career. (He has even set up a job for him at the end of the summer in Baltimore at a financial firm managed by one of his old friends.) When Art graduates from the University of Pittsburgh, he has only a vague hope for a summer of adventure before he commits to the rest of his life. Bechstein almost immediately meets a charming young gay gentleman, Arthur Lecomte, and his friend, a highly literate biker, Cleveland Arning, who become his partners in many summer adventures.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3234071. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1985 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.