Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is a short story writer and novelist from Detroit in the United States. His debut novel was The Virgin Suicides that was published in 1993 to great acclaim. Jeffrey was born in Detroit Michigan to a mother of Irish-English ancestry and a father with Greek descent. He would attend University Liggett School at Grosse Pointe’s before proceeding to Brown University where he studied English under his hero John Hawkes. After graduate from Brown University, he took a year’s sabbatical backpacking in Europe and volunteering in Calcutta, India with Mother Teresa. He would later join Stanford University from where he got his M.A in creative writing. Euginedes had always known that he was destined to be an author from a very young …show more content…
His first two titles Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides are set in Grosse Pointe and the Detroit suburbs where he lived for much of his childhood and youth. The contrasted settings of affluent suburbs and the once proud byt now decaying city are characterized in such vivid colors in the novel, particularly the inextricable links between them. The Virgin suicides which tells the story of the gruesome deaths of the five sisters is set in Grosse Pointe, as told from the perspective of their would be suitors. Euginedes took an audacious gamble in writing The Virgin Suicides in the first person plural and Middlesex as an intersex person. Stephanides Callie was born and raised as a girl but after a hard puberty goes to a gender reassignment specialist who helps her on the journey to become and live as a man. The author explains the genetics, biology, and sociology of the intersex Cal by revisiting and reconstructing his childhood memories and family history, that stretches from 1920s Turkey right to the boom age of automobile age Detroit. The novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as a reader for the Oprah Book Club in 2007, which further served to make the author a household name. By this time, he was writing another classic The Marriage Plot, an autobiographical novel dramatizing the collision of New Criticism and radical French theory during his years at Brown