John Green
Based on Wikipedia: John Green
In 2001, a young man in Chicago couldn't eat. His anxiety had become so severe that for a period he survived on two-liter bottles of Sprite, nothing else. He moved back in with his parents, saw a psychiatrist, started medication. When he returned to Chicago and could finally function again, he began writing a novel about a boarding school, a girl named Alaska, and the way a single event can cleave a life into before and after.
That novel would win the American Library Association's highest honor for young adult fiction. Its author, John Green, would go on to sell more than fifty million books worldwide, become one of the most influential voices on YouTube, raise millions for charity, and fundamentally reshape what young adult literature could be.
But the anxiety never left. It's still there, threaded through everything he creates.
The Making of a Writer
John Michael Green was born on August 24, 1977, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His family moved constantly during his early childhood—Michigan, then Birmingham, Alabama, then Orlando, Florida—following his father's work as a state director for The Nature Conservancy. Green has described his upbringing with characteristic honesty: although he had a happy childhood, he was not always a happy child.
The unhappiness had a clinical dimension. Green has struggled with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder his entire life. He's spoken openly about being bullied during high school and how it made his teenage years miserable. These weren't passing difficulties. They were the defining texture of his inner life.
At fifteen, Green started attending Indian Springs School, a boarding school outside Birmingham. The experience would prove formative in unexpected ways. He became close friends with Daniel Alarcón, who would later become an acclaimed novelist himself. And though he didn't know it at the time, his future wife Sarah Urist was attending the same school. They wouldn't become friends until years later, but the seeds of his life were being planted.
Green graduated from Indian Springs in 1995 and enrolled at Kenyon College in Ohio, a small liberal arts school that has produced an unusual number of writers—E.L. Doctorow, Robert Lowell, and Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame among them. Green threw himself into an unlikely double major: English and religious studies. He also joined a comedy troupe with Ransom Riggs, who would later write Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
After graduating in 2000, Green had a plan. He would become an Episcopal priest.
The Chaplaincy That Changed Everything
Green enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School and took a position as a student chaplain at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He never actually attended classes at the divinity school. The hospital work was enough—more than enough.
Working with children suffering from life-threatening illnesses and injuries is not like reading about it. It's not like imagining it. Green spent six months in proximity to the kind of suffering that either breaks people or transforms them. For Green, it did both. The experiences were traumatic enough to make him abandon his path toward the priesthood entirely.
But they also planted something. Years later, when Green sat down to write about a teenage girl with terminal cancer who falls in love, he would draw on what he'd witnessed in those hospital corridors. The Fault in Our Stars didn't come from nowhere. It came from a young man who had held the hands of dying children and decided he needed to find another way to make meaning of it.
After leaving the chaplaincy, Green moved to Chicago and briefly continued performing comedy. Then, in 2001, he was hired as an editorial assistant at Booklist, a book review journal published by the American Library Association. He reviewed hundreds of books, with particular focus on literary fiction, Islam, and—oddly specifically—conjoined twins. He wrote radio essays for NPR's All Things Considered and for WBEZ, Chicago's public radio station.
The radio essays came about through an email correspondence with Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a children's book author and creative polymath who became a close friend and mentor. Green was accumulating mentors the way some people accumulate frequent flyer miles—people who saw something in him and decided to invest.
The Lunch That Made a Novelist
At Booklist, Green met Ilene Cooper, a children's book author and the magazine's children's book editor. Cooper saw something in Green. More importantly, she made him see something in himself.
"I saw that real people like Ilene wrote books; they weren't written in ivory towers."
This might sound obvious, but for someone who wants to write, it's often the hardest thing to believe: that regular people actually produce the books you read. That there isn't some secret guild, some special knowledge, some fundamental difference between writers and everyone else. Cooper invited Green to lunch to discuss his future and set him a deadline: bring her a draft of a novel.
Green missed the deadline. Twice.
Then came the mental health crisis. The Sprite. The return to his parents' house. The psychiatrist. The medication.
When Green returned to Chicago, something had shifted. He began writing Looking for Alaska. The novel would be structured around a death—chapters counting down the days "before" and then counting up the days "after." This structure was partially inspired by September 11, 2001, which had happened just months before Green's breakdown. The attacks had become a dividing line in history, in the way people talked about the world. Before and after. Green borrowed that structure for his story of a girl named Alaska and the boy who loved her.
Green presented the first draft to Cooper, who mentored him through two more versions. She sent the third draft to Dutton Children's Books in early 2003. They offered Green a publishing contract with a small four-figure advance—a few thousand dollars, essentially a bet on an unknown writer.
The book was assigned to an editor named Julie Strauss-Gabel. This pairing would prove to be one of the most significant in modern young adult publishing. Green has never written a book without Strauss-Gabel. In a 2015 interview, he reflected on their relationship with evident gratitude: "In a publishing world that maybe doesn't have as many long-term relationships as it used to, she invested a lot of time in me before I ever earned a profit. I've never written a book without Julie. I wouldn't know how to do it."
Looking for Alaska and the Printz Award
Looking for Alaska was published in March 2005. It's a coming-of-age story set at a boarding school in Alabama—fictionalized as Culver Creek Preparatory High School, but clearly drawn from Green's experiences at Indian Springs. The protagonist, Miles Halter, is obsessed with famous last words and arrives at boarding school looking for what the poet François Rabelais called "the Great Perhaps." He finds Alaska Young instead.
The novel was well-received by critics but sold modestly at first. This is the typical trajectory for literary fiction, even young adult literary fiction: good reviews, quiet sales, gradual word of mouth. Green might have remained a respected but minor figure in the young adult world.
Then the American Library Association announced the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award.
The Printz Award recognizes the year's best book written for teenagers based entirely on literary merit. It's the Pulitzer Prize of young adult fiction, and in 2006, it went to Looking for Alaska. Green described his reaction upon hearing the news as "probably the purest moment of joy I've experienced. Even when my children were born it wasn't as raw and surprising."
Book sales exploded. The Printz Award operates like a seal of approval for librarians and educators across the country, guaranteeing placement in school libraries and English curricula. Green quit his job at Booklist.
New York and the Second Novel Problem
In 2005, Green moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His then-fiancée Sarah Urist—the girl from Indian Springs, now reconnected—was attending graduate school at Columbia University. Green took a job at Mental Floss magazine while working on his second novel, which he'd already drafted while living in Chicago.
The second novel problem is well-known in publishing. A debut novelist has their entire life to write their first book and about eighteen months to write their second. The pressure is immense. Some writers never solve it.
Green's solution was to write something completely different. An Abundance of Katherines, released in September 2006, is about a seventeen-year-old prodigy named Colin Singleton who has dated—and been dumped by—nineteen girls named Katherine. The novel includes actual mathematical formulas that Colin develops to predict the trajectory of relationships. It's weird and specific and much funnier than Looking for Alaska.
Reviewers noticed the tonal shift. The book was a runner-up for the Printz Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Green had avoided the sophomore slump.
While in New York, Green also co-authored several gift books for Mental Floss, including Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets, What's the Difference?, and Scatterbrained. He wrote book criticism for The New York Times Book Review. He was becoming, in a quiet way, a literary figure.
The Vlogbrothers Experiment
On January 1, 2007, John Green and his younger brother Hank began a project that would change both their lives more than any book ever could.
The premise was simple, almost arbitrary. For one year, the brothers would abandon all text-based communication—no emails, no text messages, no letters—and instead maintain their relationship entirely through video blogs posted to YouTube. They called it Brotherhood 2.0. Each brother would post a video on alternating weekdays, creating a public correspondence that anyone could watch.
The project could have been a curiosity, a private joke between siblings. Instead, it caught fire.
YouTube in 2007 was still finding its identity. It had been acquired by Google just the year before for $1.65 billion—a price that seemed astronomical at the time and now looks like the deal of the century. The platform was hungry for content creators who weren't just uploading cat videos. The Green brothers, with their bookish enthusiasm and rapid-fire intelligence, found an audience.
A breakthrough came when Hank's video "Accio Deathly Hallows"—a song about the final Harry Potter book—was featured on YouTube's front page. Views multiplied. Subscribers accumulated. The brothers discovered they had stumbled into something larger than a year-long experiment.
On December 31, 2007, in what was supposed to be the project's final video, John and Hank announced they would continue indefinitely. As of August 2024, they've maintained their video correspondence for more than seventeen years. The channel has over 3.7 million subscribers and has crossed one billion total views.
Nerdfighteria and the Project for Awesome
The community that formed around the Vlogbrothers came to call themselves "Nerdfighters." The name sounds confrontational but means something gentler—not people who fight nerds, but nerds who fight, together, against forces like ignorance and injustice. It's a deliberately silly term for what became a genuinely powerful movement.
One early Nerdfighter would profoundly shape the community's culture. Esther Earl was a teenager who discovered the Vlogbrothers and became deeply connected to John and Hank and the broader Nerdfighter world. In 2010, at age sixteen, Esther died of thyroid cancer.
The community's response to Esther's death says something important about what Nerdfighteria became. Each year on August 3, Nerdfighters celebrate "Esther Day"—not by mourning, but by telling the people in their lives that they love them. Esther's parents, Wayne and Lori Earl, founded a nonprofit called This Star Won't Go Out, which the community continues to support. Green wrote the introduction to Esther's posthumously published biography.
He has also acknowledged that Esther was an inspiration for Hazel, the protagonist of The Fault in Our Stars.
The Nerdfighter community's most ambitious project is the Project for Awesome, or P4A, an annual telethon-style fundraiser that began in 2007. The format is chaotic and charming: a forty-eight-hour livestream during which community members vote on charities while pledging money and receiving donated perks. The Green brothers host alongside other YouTube personalities like Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day and astronomer Phil Plait.
The Project for Awesome has grown steadily. In 2023, it raised over three million dollars. In 2024, it raised more than three and a half million. These are not small numbers for a community fundraiser built on the backs of nerds watching people talk into cameras.
The Business of Being Awesome
In 2008, Hank Green and Alan Lastufka co-founded DFTBA Records. The acronym stands for "Don't Forget to Be Awesome," a phrase that had become the Nerdfighter rallying cry. John later became a co-owner.
Originally a record label focused on music by YouTube personalities, DFTBA has evolved into a merchandise company. It's a reminder that the Greens have built not just a community but an actual business—one that employs people and generates revenue and requires the kind of boring operational work that doesn't make for good videos.
In 2010, the brothers launched VidCon, a conference for the online video community. The idea was simple: bring as many creators and fans together as possible, in person, for a weekend. The first VidCon drew popular YouTubers and their audiences and included an industry conference for professionals in the online video space.
The event was successful enough to become annual, growing each year until Viacom acquired VidCon in 2018. What started as a gathering of internet friends had become valuable enough for a major media conglomerate to purchase.
Paper Towns and Collaboration
Throughout the Vlogbrothers years, Green kept writing novels. In June 2007, he moved back to Indianapolis when Sarah took a position as a curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He continued work on his third solo novel.
First, though, came a collaboration. Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances, released in September 2008, was written with fellow young adult authors Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle. The book consists of three interconnected stories set in the same small town on Christmas Eve during a massive snowstorm. Green's contribution was called "A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle." The book hit number ten on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback children's books.
Paper Towns, Green's third solo novel, was released in October 2008. Set in the suburbs of Orlando, where Green had spent much of his childhood, the book follows Quentin "Q" Jacobsen as he searches for Margo Roth Spiegelman, his neighbor and childhood sweetheart who has mysteriously disappeared.
The novel is often described as a deconstruction of what film critic Nathan Rabin called the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl"—that stock character in movies and books who exists only to teach a brooding male protagonist how to embrace life. Green himself has used this description. Margo Roth Spiegelman looks like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl at first, but the novel's project is to reveal her as something more complicated: an actual person with her own inner life, not a prop for a boy's coming-of-age.
Paper Towns debuted at number five on The New York Times Best Seller list for children's books. It won the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Novel and the 2010 Corine Literature Prize, a German award for literature.
In April 2010, Green published another collaboration: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, written with David Levithan. The novel alternates between two teenagers who share a name—Green wrote the chapters about the straight Will Grayson, while Levithan wrote the chapters about the gay Will Grayson. The two characters eventually meet, and their stories intertwine.
The book made publishing history as the first novel with LGBT themes to reach The New York Times children's best-seller list. It was a runner-up for the Stonewall Book Award for excellence in LGBT children's and young adult literature.
Crash Course and the Education Empire
In 2011, the Green brothers launched Crash Course, an educational YouTube channel that would become perhaps their most lasting contribution to the internet.
The premise is straightforward: create engaging, fast-paced educational videos on a wide range of subjects. John hosts the humanities courses—literature, history, and philosophy. Hank handles the sciences. Over time, the channel expanded to include hosts covering economics, psychology, sociology, and dozens of other subjects.
Crash Course videos have become a fixture in classrooms worldwide. Teachers assign them as homework. Students watch them before exams. The combination of rigorous content and entertaining delivery hit a sweet spot that traditional educational media had been missing.
The channel has hundreds of videos and billions of total views. It's free, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and designed to supplement rather than replace traditional education. It's also, like everything the Greens do, deeply earnest—made by people who genuinely believe that learning is exciting and want to share that excitement with everyone.
The Fault in Our Stars
In August 2009, Green announced he was writing a new book titled The Sequel. The title was a placeholder. The book would take three more years to complete.
The Fault in Our Stars was published in January 2012. It's the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old with terminal thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. At a support group for young cancer patients, she meets Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old whose osteosarcoma cost him a leg. They fall in love.
The novel is funny and devastating and deeply philosophical. Its title comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Green inverts the sentiment—some faults really are in our stars, in the random cruelty of a universe that gives children cancer.
The book drew on Green's experiences as a hospital chaplain, on his friendship with Esther Earl, and on his own struggles with mortality and meaning. It was, in many ways, the book he had been preparing to write his entire life.
The Fault in Our Stars debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. It stayed on the list for years. It has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.
The 2014 film adaptation, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, was a massive commercial and critical success. It grossed over three hundred million dollars worldwide against a budget of twelve million. The film's success prompted adaptations of Green's other works: Paper Towns became a film in 2015, Looking for Alaska became a Hulu limited series in 2019, and Let It Snow became a Netflix film in 2019.
In 2014, Time magazine included Green in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Turtles All the Way Down and the Return to Darkness
After The Fault in Our Stars, Green struggled. The book's success was overwhelming. The expectations for his next novel were impossible. For years, he worked on projects that didn't come together.
Turtles All the Way Down, published in October 2017, was worth the wait. It's the story of Aza Holmes, a sixteen-year-old with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder who becomes involved in the search for a missing billionaire. But the mystery plot is almost beside the point. The real subject is Aza's mind—the intrusive thoughts, the compulsive behaviors, the terror of being trapped inside your own head.
The novel is Green's most autobiographical work. He has obsessive-compulsive disorder. He knows what it's like to have thoughts you can't control, to perform rituals you know are irrational, to feel like a prisoner in your own consciousness. Writing Aza's story was, in some ways, writing his own.
The title comes from a philosophical thought experiment about the nature of reality. In one version of the story, a scientist gives a lecture on astronomy, and an old woman tells him he's wrong—the world is actually a flat plate sitting on the back of a giant turtle. When the scientist asks what the turtle is standing on, she replies, "It's turtles all the way down."
Green uses the phrase to describe the infinite regress of consciousness, the way thoughts can spiral down and down and down with no bottom. It's a profound and terrifying image for what anxiety can feel like.
The Anthropocene Reviewed
In January 2018, Green launched a podcast called The Anthropocene Reviewed. The premise was simple and strange: he would review different facets of the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch, defined by human influence on the planet—on a five-star scale.
He reviewed sunsets. He reviewed the Taco Bell breakfast menu. He reviewed the song "You'll Never Walk Alone." He reviewed the smallpox vaccine and the Penguins of Madagascar movie and the year 1986. Each review was an essay, deeply researched and beautifully written, that used its ostensible subject as a launching point for meditations on memory, mortality, meaning, and what it's like to be a human being on this planet at this particular moment in history.
The podcast ran until 2021, when Green adapted it into his first nonfiction book. The Anthropocene Reviewed collected the essays with new material and revisions. It became a bestseller and was widely praised as some of Green's finest writing.
The essays dealt more directly with Green's anxiety and OCD than any of his previous work. He wrote about intrusive thoughts, about the terror of his own mind, about the ways that mental illness had shaped his experience of being alive. He wrote about the death of his friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the mentor who had helped launch his career. He wrote about finding hope in small things—in sunsets, in his children, in the stubborn persistence of beauty in a world that can feel unbearable.
Global Health Advocacy
Since the mid-2010s, Green has become increasingly involved in global health causes. He serves as a trustee for Partners In Health, a nonprofit organization that works to provide healthcare to underserved populations worldwide.
Green has focused particularly on two issues: maternal mortality in Sierra Leone and tuberculosis worldwide. These are not glamorous causes—they don't attract celebrity attention the way some diseases do—but they represent some of the most preventable suffering in the world.
Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality rates on Earth. A woman giving birth in Sierra Leone is dramatically more likely to die than a woman giving birth in a wealthy country. This isn't because childbirth is inherently more dangerous there; it's because of the absence of basic medical care that wealthy countries take for granted. Partners In Health works to change that.
Tuberculosis, or TB, is one of the oldest diseases in human history. It's also one of the most deadly: TB killed roughly 1.3 million people in 2022, making it the second-leading cause of death from a single infectious agent after COVID-19. And yet it's treatable. It's curable. The people who die from TB die largely because they lack access to diagnosis and medication that have existed for decades.
Green's advocacy has included speaking at international conferences, producing educational content about these diseases, and leveraging his massive platform to raise awareness and funds. In March 2025, he released Everything Is Tuberculosis, his second nonfiction book, focused on the disease and the global effort to combat it.
The Writer and His Ghosts
John Green's career defies easy categorization. He's a novelist who writes tearjerkers about dying teenagers. He's a YouTuber who's maintained a daily video correspondence with his brother for nearly two decades. He's an educator whose videos have been watched billions of times. He's an advocate who has raised millions for causes most people haven't heard of.
But more than anything, he's a person who has found a way to transform his suffering into connection.
Green's anxiety and OCD have never gone away. He still struggles. He still takes medication. He still has days when his mind feels like a prison. But he has also found ways to make that suffering legible to others—through novels, through essays, through videos where he talks directly to a camera about what it feels like to be him.
There's something radical about this. For most of human history, mental illness was hidden, shameful, something to overcome privately or suffer alone. Green's willingness to discuss his inner life in public, to write novels that take seriously the experience of having a brain that works against you, has helped countless readers feel less alone with their own struggles.
The young man who couldn't eat, who survived on Sprite and desperation, who thought he might become a priest before the suffering of children broke something in him—that young man is still there, in every word Green writes. He just found better ways to use the pain.
Looking for Alaska ends with its protagonist understanding that the labyrinth of suffering isn't something you escape. It's something you survive, moment by moment, by choosing to hope. That insight came from somewhere real. It came from a writer who knows what the labyrinth looks like from the inside and keeps writing anyway, keeps making videos, keeps raising money for people who are suffering in different ways.
Don't forget to be awesome, the Nerdfighters say. It sounds like a slogan on a t-shirt. But maybe it's actually a philosophy: that in a world full of darkness, the deliberate choice to create light—through books, through community, through showing up for one another—is the most meaningful thing a person can do.