John Michael Green (born August 24, 1977) is an award-winning young adult novelist and famous Internet vlogger as one half of the VlogBrothers (alongside his younger brother Hank Green), as well as a podcaster and philanthropist.
Green has currently written five novels, and further contributed to two more novels in collaboration with other YA authors (Will Grayson, Will Grayson with David Levithan, and Let It Snow with Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle). He won the Printz Award for his first solo book, Looking for Alaska, and stayed at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for upwards of fifty weeks with his fourth solo book, The Fault in Our Stars, which has reportedly sold over 23 million copies.
On the Internet, he's best known through his YouTube ventures with his brother Hank, including the aforementioned VlogBrothers channel as well as the widely popular convention VidCon. He is also the host of the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed (later turned into a nonfiction book), which sees him reviewing "different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale", and is noted for giving lectures on the humanities with the program Crash Course. He is additionally the writer behind the interactive novel/riddle game thisisnottom and hosted the YouTube channel for the magazine mental_floss (which he had written for early in his career) from 2013 to 2018.
It should be noted that among his accomplishments are that, despite being a very common name, all but one of the results on the first page of a Google search on "John Green" are for him, and that during his early years on YouTube, he got the tens of thousands of followers he and his brother had to refer to his wife, art curator Sarah Urist Green, as "The Yeti" (referring to the rarity and brevity of her appearances in early VlogBrothers videos), and is still married.
A number of his books have seen official adaptations. The Fault in Our Stars was adapted into a film in 2014, in which he was given a short cameo (which was then cut); his third solo book Paper Towns was adapted into a film released the following year; Looking for Alaska, which had been in the works of getting a movie for quite a long time (over 10 years!), was instead turned into a miniseries that premiered on Hulu in 2019; and a film adaptation of his fifth solo book, Turtles All the Way Down, will release in 2024 on Max.
Works:
- Looking for Alaska (2005)
- An Abundance of Katherines (2006)
- Let It Snow - along with Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle (2008)
- Paper Towns (2008)
- "Freak the Geek", short story for the anthology Geektastic (2009)
- Zombicorns - online novella (2010)
- Will Grayson, Will Grayson - along with author David Levithan (2010)
- The Fault in Our Stars (2012)
- The Miracle of Swindon Town, Let's Play-Fan Fiction-autobigraphical-monologuing of FIFA Soccer 11
- Turtles All the Way Down (2017)
Tropes that generally apply to this author
- Author Appeal: He really loves deconstructing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Blithe Spirit tropes. At least four of his full-length novels contain a central character who seems to be a larger-than-life personality out to improve the lives of their prosaic peers, but ultimately turns out to be just a flawed human being with their own problems and insecurities.
