Jonathan Safran Foer won wide acclaim for his novel Everything Is Illuminated, which is based on his journey back to Ukraine in 1997 in an effort to investigate his family history, especially of his late maternal grandfather. The grandfather had escaped the Holocaust with the help of a woman in his Ukrainian hometown, the small Jewish village, or shtetl, of Trachimbrod, but the family knew nothing beyond that. Foer's novel won him the Guardian Prize and the National Jewish Book Award.

Foer was born and raised in Washington, D. C., and attended Princeton University, where a class with famed novelist Joyce Carol Oates made him think about a writing career. "She was the first person ever to make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way," Foer told Robert Birnbaum at the Identity Theory Web Site. "And my life really changed after that." With...