Walter Kirn
American novelist
Walter Norris Kirn (born August 3, 1962) is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into a film of the same name starring George Clooney.
Education
Kirn graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." In 1985, he obtained an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at Trinity College Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Memorial Foundation Scholar.
Writing
Kirn has published a collection of short stories and several novels. These include Thumbsucker (1999), which was made into a 2005 film featuring Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn. Kirn's 2001 novel, Up in the Air, has been characterized as a literary chronotope relating to the genre of road narratives. It was made into a 2009 film directed by Jason Reitman. Starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, it was a commercial success and went on to receive critical acclaim as well as numerous nominations and awards.
In 2005, Kirn took over blogger Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish while Sullivan was on vacation. He also wrote The Unbinding, an Internet-only novel that was published in Slate magazine.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walter Kirn” 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.