Autographs of Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem (/ˈliːθəm/ LEETH-əm born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College. In 2025 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, a prestigious honor recognizing exceptional artists and scholars in the arts and humanities.
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist involved in the early New York hip hop scene, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in Brooklyn, in the northern section of the neighborhood of Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Lethem's fourth grade teacher at P.S. 29 in nearby Cobble Hill was future New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, whom he called the "perfect" teacher and to whom he dedicated his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars 21 times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick's work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing —language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
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Current items with a signature of Jonathan Lethem
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Traded items with a signature of Jonathan Lethem
The most expensive item with a signature of Jonathan Lethem (SIGNED Jonathan Lethem Phillip K. Dick Collection Library of America BoxSet 1/1) was sold in April 2025 for £540.19 while the cheapest item (THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE Jonathan Lethem (Vintage 2003, pb) FN SIGNED) found a new owner for £3.82 in October 2024. The month with the most items sold (24) was December 2025 with an average selling price of £41.16 for an autographed item of Jonathan Lethem. Sold items reached their highest average selling price in August 2024 with £95.47 and the month that saw the lowest prices with £4.44 was July 2023. In average, an autographed item from Jonathan Lethem is worth £38.31.
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