A professor at Swarthmore has decided to embark on a biography of the still-living (at least at last report) novelist Jonathan Franzen. One can only imagine the anticipatory salivation at Oprah's Book Club headquarters.

Per Alexandra Alter at the New York Times, our good professor has had only a two-hour interview with Franzen; most of the personal details in the biography will be drawn out of the author's autobiographical essays. It will be entitled Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. As for the rest:

An announcement of the deal on the industry website Publishers Marketplace promises that the book will explore "Franzen's metamorphoses as a person and as a writer — from his ultrasensitive childhood through his Swarthmore years, his troubled marriage and his tumultuous self-reappraisal during the 1990s, up to his arrival on the mainstream cultural scene as a literary icon."

What could be more fascinating than reading another man's regurgitation of Jonathan Franzen's personal essays?

Though if he's taking requests, I do hope the good professor explains to us, at minimum, what on earth was going on with this mid-1990s choice of hairstyle.

[Image via Getty.]