Background
The essay was initially published in the April 1996 issue of Harper's between the publication of Franzen's novels Strong Motion (1992) and The Corrections (2001). Franzen expanded and revised the essay, re-titling it "Why Bother?", and published it in his 2002 essay collection How to Be Alone. In the introduction to the collection, Franzen explained his changing to title as a response to so to many interviewers asking about the essay, but failing to understand its intention, believing the essay to be an explicit promise on Franzen's part of a third "Big Social Novel" featuring a good deal of local detail and observation. Franzen, instead, thought of the essay as a defence of reading and writing literature for its own sake in a modern world, expanding the essay later in response. Humorously, Franzen notes that the original title was chosen by a Harper's editor hoping for easy recognition with Hamlet's soliloquy, but frequently referred to by interviewers as "The Harper's Essay." The essay makes frequent reference to the Paula Fox novel Desperate Characters, the work of linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22 as well as previous literary manifestos of Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor and Tom Wolfe.
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