He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011).

The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.

[2] He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe, during which time he also volunteered with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

He has said that he has "a perverse love" of his birthplace: "I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music, Motown, the MC5, house, techno.

[6] In 1983, after graduating from Brown, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of becoming a writer and lived on Haight Street.

[7] In 1986, he received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit."

After living a few years in San Francisco, he moved to Brooklyn, New York and worked as secretary for the Academy of American Poets.

[2] Eugenides published short stories in the nine years between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, primarily in The New Yorker.

Eugenides temporarily put Middlesex aside in the late '90s to begin work on a novel that would eventually serve as the basis for his third.

[2] Two excerpts of what became Eugenides's work-in-progress third novel after Middlesex also appeared in The New Yorker in 2011, "Asleep in the Lord" and "Extreme Solitude."

Eugenides also served as the editor of the collection of short stories titled My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead.

[19] Following the life and self-discovery of Calliope Stephanides, or later, Cal, an intersex person raised a girl, but genetically male, Middlesex also broadly deals with the Greek American immigrant experience in the United States, the rise and fall of Detroit, and explores the experience of an intersex person in the United States.

The novel follows three young adults enmeshed in a love triangle, as they graduate from Brown University and establish themselves in the world.