Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay: A Novel,” “Wonder Boys”) is a hardcore Mac man. His primary writing tool is a Titanium PowerBook G4, according to an Apple Hot News article by Joe Cellini.
Chabon had a Mac 512K with 800K of RAM since graduate school. Walk into his backyard Berkeley studio and, in addition to his TiPB, you’ll find an iMac that’s networked both with wire and AirPort to iMacs and laptops inside the house for both his wife (also a writer) and children. Never a big fan of the laborious process of typewriting, word processing and e-mail have “radically changed” Chabon’s interactions with publishers, he told Apple.
“Everything’s electronic now, even the last holdout, my agent,” he said. “Now I routinely attach what I’ve written to an email and send it to her, which she reads and forwards to the magazine editor or whoever. And when I email a story to the New Yorker, they just use that file directly to set it up galleys. The story never sees paper until it actually gets printed.”
Chabon is now working on a children’s novel, “Summerland,” which will be published by Talk Miramax Books. Beyond that, his plans are uncertain, but he’s sure it will written on a Mac.
“My computer encourages me to write better because it makes it so much easier to write,” he said. “I take more time over my sentences, and there’s no such thing as taking too much time with your language. When Apple was going through its really hard times I sounded like this poor deluded convert to a failed religion, the last person holding out for Macs. When Steve Jobs came back and there was renewed vigor, I trumpeted it loudly to everyone. I’ve lost no opportunity to make myself obnoxious, during every epoch in Apple’s history, to people around me.”
As far as his tools go, Chabon is running Mac OS X 10.1 and using Microsoft Office for word processing. He uses Final Draft for screenwriting and PageSpinner and Fetch for maintaining his Web site.