While Justin Cronin was walking the streets of Houston with his daughter, she asked him to write a story about “a girl who saves the world.” The writer promised to fulfill the request, but he did not know that this event would become the starting point of his worldwide fame. The work he wrote would become a bestseller and top the prestigious fantasy literary list for many weeks and a popular TV series would be made based on it. The story of the talented writer’s success is next on houstonski.
Persistence as a component of success
The future writer was born and raised in New England. From an early age, he dreamed of writing a colossal and popular work that would immediately make him famous all over the world. But his youthful maximalism repeatedly failed. At first, his inspirational writings were laughed at by school teachers and peers. He was disliked by his classmates for his love of reading and his attempts to write his own works. But this did not upset the young man. He decided to continue his studies in Creative Writing after school.
However, despite his efforts, his studies at both Andover and Harvard universities did not bring the desired result. In Harvard’s creative writing course, the future writer received only a C-plus, which is a rather low grade. When the young man was on the verge of giving up his ambitions, his sister gave him a copy of one of the volumes of The Best American Short Stories. He read them with pleasure. But he was interested in something else. While looking through the biographies of already successful young writers, he noticed the following fact: most of the authors of the collection had taken a course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Justin Cronin didn’t hesitate to go to the Corn State.
Here he began to assess his capabilities more realistically and work on his mistakes. According to Justin himself, the most important thing during this period was the realization that at this stage of his life, he was not able to create a masterpiece. Once he got used to this idea and came down to earth, the young man began to write short stories. He calls them “written with despair.” But Justin does not give up his dreams of a grandiose work. Then it occurs to him that as a child, he liked stories with big plots about people in trouble, running away from bad things. This was the starting point for his majestic trilogy. But that would come later.
Houston as a symbol of success
For the time being, the pragmatism of life forced him to earn money to live. After graduation, Justin got married and moved to Houston. Here he works at Rice University as an English teacher. At the same time, he begins work on his novel Mary and O’Neil. The novel took several years to complete. The debut novel was published in 2001 and, to J. Cronin’s great surprise, it became a success. That wasn’t just success but his recognition as an author.
Mary and O’Neil was recognized as the best debut novel of the year and won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award. The Boston Globe praised the work for its portrayal of life as a triumph of hope over experience, and The New York Times Book Review called the book fearless in its storytelling, which is admirable. Understandably, such recognition was inspiring to the young author. With his analytical skills, Justin began to think about the novel’s success.
The plot is based on the story of two teachers who are going through their own family tragedies and personal losses. In terms of writing, it is a series of different but interconnected stories. Critics praised the emotional depth and lyricism of the book. The young author, after comparing all this data, came to the conclusion that the secret of his success is in revealing the ordinary lives of ordinary people but with extraordinary characters. So his future works will be exactly like that.
Success as a result of hard work
Then there was his famous walk with his daughter. After the promise, Justin sat down to write a new novel. He thought about the plot of the work. His plan was to write a novel that would combine several genres: drama, adventure, horror, science fiction, family history, mythology, classics and military reports. He chose a plot that was not at all new, even hackneyed in many aspects. It was supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world with zombie creatures that arose from unsuccessful experiments with immunity-boosting drugs.
All of this was rather trivial in 2010. However, this plot is only the background. J. Cronin focused on the relationships of people left in this world. He drew attention to such important points as the connection between parents and children, the changes of youth, the transition to the next stage of life, the trials of growing up, the feeling of devastation from the change of generations, etc. The author himself says that he read and rewrote entire chapters several times. As a result of his hard work, J. Cronin’s novel The Passage was published.
The book was published in 2010 and immediately hit #3 on The New York Times Best Seller list. This was no accident, as it remained on the list for another 7 weeks. The Passage was published in 1 million copies and sold out quickly. The San Francisco Chronicle named the novel one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2010. The National Post called it “Homeric” and “one of the creepiest books of 2010.” Even the king of horror himself, Stephen King, called Justin and congratulated him: “You put the scare back in vampires, buddy!” It was an undeniable success. Inspired by it, Cronin began writing a sequel to the novel. Thus, in 2012, The Twelve appeared, and in 2016, The City of Mirrors. The long-awaited works did not disappoint the genre’s connoisseurs. The sequels were even bigger, more intense and with unexpected outcomes.
A box office series based on the works
Immediately after the release of the first part of the trilogy, Fox 2000 and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions acquired the film rights. However, they later decided to adapt the novel into a TV series. Filming began in 2018 in the Atlanta subway. The series premiered on streaming platforms in 2019.
The success of the trilogy and the sale of the movie rights to the novel brought J. Cronin a considerable amount of money. This allowed him to quit his job as a teacher and switch to writing. Although there was already enough time to create and produce new works, especially since the admirers of Cronin’s work demanded new novels, J. Cronin did not publish anything for 7 long years. The effect of popularity probably played a role here. To publish anything would have meant admitting to creative stagnation and dooming himself to quick oblivion.
It was hard to come up with something original. However, the expectation was justified. In 2023, a new novel called The Ferryman was published. It was again a work of fantasy about the life of people on a utopian island. After reaching a certain age, young men and women were taken from the island by a mysterious carrier for a mysterious rebirth. The novel received many favorable reviews and even received a commendation from S. King.
J. Cronin did not stop there but continues to work in the literary field. He talks about creativity like this:
“Writing a novel strikes me as a lot like raising a child in the sense that you have a certain amount of control, or you hope you do. And your job is to guide it to a place where it will leave you.”