Jason Roberts (author)

He graduated from high school at the age of fourteen, then spent six years working a variety of jobs (day laborer, dishwasher, late-night disc jockey) prior to enrolling at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

ranked Learn2 as “One of the Ten Most Important Websites of the 20th Century”,[1] Roberts retired from management and returned to writing, contributing to McSweeney's, The Believer, and other publications.

In 2004, Roberts was the inaugural winner of the Van Zorn Prize, awarded by Michael Chabon for the best short fiction exemplifying the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe.

[citation needed] A Sense of the World was named a "Best Book of the Year" by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Rocky Mountain News.

According to United States publisher Random House, the work is “an epic, extraordinary account of rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth,” tracing the parallel lives and careers of the 18th-century naturalists Carl Linnaeus and George-Louis de Buffon.