Jonathan Lethem, Roy Edward Disney ’51 professor of creative writing and professor of English, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, one of the world’s most prestigious honors for scholars in the arts and humanities.
The 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows included nearly 200 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines. The grants let recipients pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions,” according to the Guggenheim Foundation.
There were approximately 3,500 applicants in this latest cycle, and honorees were selected for both prior career achievements and exceptional promise.
Past Guggenheim Fellows with ties to Pomona College include President G. Gabrielle Starr, Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna ’85, former Professor of Art Sandeep Mukherjee and Mowry Baden ’58.
“A lot of my personal idols—not just in writing, but in music composition, the visual arts, writing and poetry and nonfiction—have been Guggenheim recipients,” Lethem says. “It’s a really special feeling to be gathered up into that company.”
The Guggenheim Fellowship will give Lethem the opportunity to revisit the backdrop of two of his finest works, Fortress of Solitude (2003) and Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023). With both novels set in 1970s-1990s Brooklyn, Lethem explores urban histories, gentrification, race and civil rights in America.
Released 20 years apart, Lethem says the novels represent two of the most important things he’s spent time on, and while he never envisioned writing a literary trilogy, this untitled Guggenheim project could culminate his legacy material as such.
“If this third book is worthy of the first two,” he says, “what I hope it will do is culminate a massive, very slow-motion trilogy written over a period of four decades.”
Lethem first applied to be a Guggenheim Fellow in his 30s, before he moved to Claremont and started teaching at Pomona College. He applied for the award at least two additional times to no success, though he did receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.
While loathe to speculate on why the Guggenheim Foundation awarded him three decades after his first try, “Maybe they looked at me now and saw someone who not only can propose big things but has pulled some off,” he says.
As early as he is in the development process, Lethem can only say the Guggenheim project will be large thematically and emotionally, and perhaps the longest novel he’s ever written.
“What’s so marvelous about the Guggenheim support,” he says, “is it encourages me to stay in that pure relation where I’m not beholden to any external timetable but just the logic and necessities of the writing plan.”