Allegra Goodman


Allegra Goodman is an American writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life and education

Allegra Goodman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Hawaii. The daughter of Lenn and Madeleine Goodman, she was brought up as a Conservative Jew. Her mother, who died in 1996, was a professor of genetics and women's studies, then assistant vice president at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for many years, before moving on to Vanderbilt University in the 1990s. Her father, Lenn E. Goodman, is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt and the author of a dozen books.
Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven.
Goodman graduated from Punahou School in 1985. She then went on to Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. degree. She then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where Goodman earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature, in 1996.

Writing

Goodman's younger sister, Paula Fraenkel, is an oncologist. Fraenkel's experience in research labs is one of the inspirations for Goodman's 2006 novel Intuition.
Her short story "La Vita Nuova" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2011 and was broadcast on Public Radio International's Selected Shorts in February 2012.

Personal life

Goodman met her husband, David Karger, at Harvard. Both were regulars at Harvard Hillel, and prayed in Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan. Goodman and Karger live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Karger is a professor in computer science at MIT. They have four grown children, three boys and a girl; the youngest was about to leave home in 2018. Goodman views herself and her family as traditional Jewish in their observance.

Awards and honors

Novels

  • Kaaterskill Falls ,
  • Paradise Park ,
  • Intuition,
  • The Other Side of the Island
  • The Cookbook Collector
  • The Chalk Artist: A Novel
  • Sam: A Novel
  • ''Isola: A Novel''

    Short fiction

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