The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a 2006 memoir by Jonathan Franzen, who received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Corrections in 2001.

Franzen holds up Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons as an exemplary representation of life of the American middle class in the author's home town of Webster Groves, Missouri, and countless similar towns.

[4] In Bookmarks Sep/Oct 2005 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.0 out of 5) with the summary saying," Even the critics who admire Franzen’s writing warn readers that they are in for much of the same incessant, almost obsessive, examination that characterized The Corrections".

[6] In 2006, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass."

[7][8] Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor called the book a "whipsaw reading experience" that was both "sharply insightful and frustratingly obtuse".