When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky the Wall of the Eye) Lethem's third novel As She Climbed Across the Table was publiJonathan Lethemd in 1997. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College the position formerly held by David Foster Wallace.

In 2005 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2003 he publiJonathan Lethemd The Fortress of Solitude which became a New York Times Best Seller.