Jonathan Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer, and Esther Safran Foer, the Polish-born president of a public-relations company. Foer was one of three sons in his tight-knit Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is now the editor of The New Republic and his younger brother Joshua is a freelance journalist. Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "He wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."

Foer attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University. In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton, Foer took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy". Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.

After graduating from Princeton, Foer attended briefly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.

Safran Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a degree in Philosophy, and traveled to Ukraine to expand his thesis. In 2001, he edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe." His Princeton thesis grew into a novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. The book earned him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award. In 2005, Liev Schreiber wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel, which starred Elijah Wood.

Safran Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was published in 2005. In the novel, Safran Foer used 9/11 as a backdrop for the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell, who learns how to deal with the death of his father in the World Trade Center. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close used many nontraditional writing techniques known as visual writing. It follows multiple but interconnected storylines, is peppered with photographs of doorknobs and other such oddities, and ends with a 14-page flipbook. Safran Foer's use of these techniques resulted in both glowing praise and excoriation from critics. Despite diverse criticism, the novel sold briskly and was translated into several languages. In addition, the film rights were purchased by Warner Bros. and Paramount for a film to be produced by Scott Rudin, with Billy Eliot and The Reader director Stephen Daldry attached to direct.

In 2005, Safran Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera on September 14, 2005.Safran Foer has been an occasional vegetarian (some years vegetarian, some years omnivore, occasionally vegan) since the age of 10, and in 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., a harsh exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates vegetarianism. In his childhood, teen, and college years of vegetarianism, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate animals. Safran Foer writes he is now a vegetarian and is raising his children vegetarian. He does not mention being vegan in his writings. Safran Foer published his first book of non-fiction, Eating Animals, on November 2, 2009. Safran Foer said that he had long been "uncertain about how I felt [about eating meat]" and that the birth of his first child inspired "an urgency because I would have to make decisions on his behalf." The book intersperses a personal narrative with a more "broad argument" about vegetarianism.

In spring 2008, Safran Foer taught writing for the first time as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University. He is currently a professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and is currently working on his third novel.

In June 2004, Safran Foer married the novelist Nicole Krauss. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.

In 2000, Safran Foer was awarded the All-Story Fiction Prize, in 2003 he won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and in 2007 he was included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2.In Spring 2007, Foer stayed at the American Academy in Berlin as a Holtzbrinck Fellow.

Safran Foer is one of the more controversial novelists of the past decade, not for the content of his writing, but rather for its unconventional style and the extremely polarized responses this style has elicited from readers. The initial release of Everything Is Illuminated received overwhelming acclaim from both professional reviewers and well-known authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Jeffrey Eugenides and Dale Peck . The Times proclaimed that the book was "a work of genius," that Safran Foer had "staked his claim for literary greatness," and that "after it, things will never be the same."

Francine Prose wrote in The New York Times Book Review about Foer’s first novel: "Not since Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio."

Salman Rushdie said that “Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel is everything that one hoped it would be — ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all, in its portrait of orphaned Oskar, extremely moving. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed. An exceptional achievement.”John Updike also wrote a review of the novel.

Detractors of Safran Foer find his work gimmicky. Particularly bothersome to some readers is the virtual catalogue of modernist devices he employed in his first novel, including time shifts, dialect writing, fanciful mock-history, dramatic prose, poetic devices, and stream of consciousness. The frequency of these devices strike some as insincere and pretentious and a little too clever to be taken seriously. The most notorious of these critics is Harry Siegel when he was still a part of the New York Press, who bluntly subtitled an article on Safran Foer, "Why the Author of Everything Is Illuminated is a Fraud and a Hack."

Other criticism has taken a more evenhanded view, acknowledging the breathless silliness of some of the writer's early acclaim, while appreciating his considerable talent. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books about Safran Foer's growing body of work, Wyatt Mason said "Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits." The Times published a review of Everything Is Illuminated that it titled "Luminous talent in the spotlight"; it states that "the technique feels clumsy at first, but soon brings new levels of linguistic fun."

Novels

• Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Non-fiction books

• Eating Animals (2009)

Short stories

• "The Very Rigid Search" (excerpted from Everything Is Illuminated) (The New Yorker, June 18, 2001)
• "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe" (included in A Convergence of Birds)
• " A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" (The New Yorker, June 10, 2002)
• "The Sixth Borough" (became part of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; also featured in the collection "Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creature from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out."[1])
• " Cravings"
• " About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition" (The Guardian, December 2, 2002)
• " Room After Room" (included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2," Granta 97" published in 2007)
• "Rhoda" (published in The Book of Other People, 2008)
• "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" (The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010)

Other

• "Imagining Giovanni's Gift", Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20 (Spring 2000)
• "The Proximity of Brad to Bradford: A Brief Introduction to the Lifework of Bradford Morrow", Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20 (Spring 2000)
• A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell (2001), Editor and contributor
• Sock Monkeys: 200 Out of 1,863 (2002), Contributor: "Il Fait Plus Froid Ailleurs"
• Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (2003), Contributor: "The Very Rigid Search"
• The Future Dictionary of America (2004), Co-editor, with Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and Eli Horowitz
• The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud (2004), Introduction.
• Masters of American Comics edited by John Carlin (2005), Contributor: "Breakdownable"
• The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning (2005), collects "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and an excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• " A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah", The New York Times (December 22, 2005) Op-ed piece
• Joe, photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto, designed by Takaaki Matsumoto (2006) Text by Foer
• " My Life as a Dog", The New York Times (November 27, 2006) Op-ed piece
• The Diary of Petr Ginz, edited by Chava Pressburger (2007), Contributor: "What We Say We Are"
• The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, by Bruno Schultz (Penguin Classics Edition 2008), Forward
• "La Vie on Pose", Vogue December 2008
• Ron Arad: No Discipline (MoMA 2009), Contributor: "You Look Up Escape Artist"