Eugenides, Jeffrey (1960-…), is an American author. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel Middlesex (2002).
Middlesex partly reflects the author’s Greek-American heritage, as it follows several generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family in Detroit. The story is told through the eyes of a family member who is a hermaphrodite—that is, a person who possesses both male and female physical and sexual characteristics. The individual was born as a female named Calliope but by puberty had begun assuming the characteristics of a male. The adolescent, called Cal, chooses his male self and grows into adulthood as a man.
The novel describes the Greek-American immigrant experience in the United States and the economic rise and fall of Detroit in the late 1900’s. The novel also examines the experiences of individuals with unconventional sexual characteristics. The Stephanides family itself has an unorthodox sexual history. Cal’s paternal grandparents were brother and sister, and his parents were second cousins.
Eugenides’s first novel was The Virgin Suicides (1993). The book explores the suicides of five young sisters and the psychological and social forces that drove them to their deaths. The story is narrated from the viewpoint of neighborhood boys who closely observed the girls. Eugenides’s third novel, The Marriage Plot (2011), centers on the romantic relationships among three college students and how their lives change after they graduate. Several of Eugenides’s short stories were collected in Fresh Complaint (2017). He has also written essays.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides was born on March 8, 1960, in Detroit. He earned a B.A. degree in English from Brown University in 1983 and an M.A. degree in English and creative writing from Stanford University in 1986. In 2007, Eugenides became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
