SOURCE: McQuade, Molly. “Works in Progress: A Nonsmoker's Novel by Jonathan Franzen.” Booklist 94, no. 21 (July 1998): 1865.

In the following article, McQuade relays Franzen's opinions regarding how his quitting smoking has impacted his as-yet uncompleted novel The Corrections.

“Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I want to think about,” claimed Jonathan Franzen in the first sentence of his essay, “Sifting the Ashes,” published in the New Yorker in May 1996. “When I see an actress or an actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the carbon monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts. Cigarettes … scare the hell out of me.”

His paradoxical polemic was the tell-all of a writer who for many years smoked whenever he wrote (though rarely when he didn't), who gradually...