John Green
John Michael Green was born on August 24, 1977, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He grew up in Orlando, Florida, and attended the Indian Springs School in Alabama, a formative experience that provided the basis for his debut novel. He studied English and Religious Studies at Kenyon College in Ohio, graduating in 2000, and subsequently worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital in Columbus, an experience confronting childhood illness and death that would directly inform his most celebrated novel. He also worked briefly as an editorial assistant before devoting himself full time to writing.
Green’s debut novel, Looking for Alaska (2005), won the Michael L. Printz Award, the highest honour in young adult literature in the United States, and immediately established him as a major voice in the genre. The novel centres on the narrator Miles Halter’s obsessive friendship with the brilliant, self-destructive Alaska Young at a fictional Alabama boarding school. Its frank treatment of adolescent sexuality, grief, and the search for meaning set the template for Green’s subsequent work.
His fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), became a global phenomenon. The story of two teenagers, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who meet in a cancer support group and fall in love, was praised for its refusal of sentimentality despite its devastating subject matter. It spent weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, sold over twenty million copies worldwide, and was adapted into a successful film in 2014. The novel’s central insight, that love and meaning are not diminished by the inevitability of death, resonated with readers of all ages and generated a passionate, multigenerational readership.
Beyond his novels, Green has had an enormous influence on reading culture through his YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, co-created with his brother Hank Green, and through the educational channel CrashCourse, which provides free educational content to millions of viewers worldwide. Green received the Printz Award for Looking for Alaska and has received multiple Goodreads Choice Awards. He is one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and has received honorary doctorates from several universities. He lives in Indianapolis and his body of work, combining the emotional directness of great young adult fiction with genuine intellectual depth, has made him one of the defining literary voices of his generation.
