Jonathan Franzen on Cover of TIME Magazine

According to MediaBistro’s GalleyCat, Jonathan Franzen has become the first living novelist to grace the cover of Time magazine in ten years. Novelist Stephen King was the last writer to hold to coveted spot, back in 2000.

Here’s an excerpt: “Franzen is a member of another perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist. But he’s not as cool about it as the otters. He’s uneasy. He’s a physically solid guy, 6 ft. 2 in., with significant shoulders, but his posture is not so much hunched as flinched. At 50 (he turns 51 on Aug. 17), Franzen is pleasantly boyish-looking, with permanently tousled hair.”

A complete list of all the authors that starred in Time cover stories follows below. The online edition of Lev Grossman’s cover story about Franzen is abridged. The online article explains: “This is an abridged version of an article that appears in the August 23, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME magazine.”

Here is a list of author’s who have graced the TIME magazine cover.

Virginia Woolf (1937)
William Faulkner (1939)
Robert Frost (1950)
James Baldwin (1963)
John Updike (1968)
Norman Mailer (1973)
Alexander Solzhentisyn (1974)
John Le Carre (1977)
Michael Crighton (1995)
Toni Morrison (1998)
Stephen King (2000)
Jonathan Franzen (2010)

The New Yorker also has a post about the cultural weight of Franzen’s appearance on the cover.