John Green

John Michael Green (born 1977 in Indianapolis) is an American novelist for young readers who is also known as a video blogger and producer. His books have sold in very large numbers and have helped change how publishers and readers think about young adult fiction, since his stories tackle serious subjects with a good deal of humor and have found an adult audience too.

He grew up in Florida after living in several cities, because his father's work with an environmental organization kept moving the family. He finished high school at a boarding school in Alabama, Indian Springs School, which later inspired his first novel. He studied English and religious studies at Kenyon College and graduated in 2000. He had planned to become an Episcopal priest, but working as a chaplain in a children's hospital made him rethink that path.

He then took a job at Booklist, a book review magazine in Chicago, where he read hundreds of titles and began writing his own first novel. Looking for Alaska, published in 2005, is a coming-of-age story set at a boarding school and split into a before and an after built around a death. It won the Michael L. Printz Award in 2006, and sales rose quickly afterward. That same year he published An Abundance of Katherines, about a brilliant but depressed teenage boy.

His profile grew through the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, which he started in 2007 with his younger brother Hank. The project gave rise to an online community called Nerdfighteria and to Project for Awesome, an annual charity campaign. The brothers also made Crash Course, an educational channel. In 2008 he published Paper Towns, and in 2010, with David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

His best-known novel, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a film in 2014, the same year Time magazine named him among the world's 100 most influential people. He has also written essays, including The Anthropocene Reviewed, and has become a public advocate for global health, especially the fight against tuberculosis, working with Partners In Health. His novel Turtles All the Way Down (2017) deals with the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder he has lived with for much of his life.

His legacy is twofold. In young adult fiction he showed that teenage readers will seek out difficult subjects without giving up humor. Online, his mix of education and community helped shape a generation of video creators.