John Burnham Schwartz's first book, Bicycle Days, a coming of age story about a young American man in Japan, was published in 1989 on his 24th birthday. It was critically acclaimed, as was Reservation Road, his second novel, published in 1998, which was made into a motion picture based on Schwartz's screenplay. Schwartz published Claire Marvel and, in 2008,The Commoner, a novel inspired by the lives of the current empress and crown princess of Japan. Schwartz's fifth novel, Northwest Corner picks up the lives of some of the characters from Reservation Road twelve years later. He has taught writing at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence and is the literary director of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference