Literary fans rejoice: A new John Green book is on the way.
“Hollywood, Ending” — a story about two young actors filming an Andy Warhol biopic — will arrive in September as the Indianapolis-based author’s first fiction book in nearly a decade. The book follows hit young adult novels like “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Paper Towns” and “Looking for Alaska,” all of which have been adapted for the screen.
Before the book hits the shelves this fall, get to know the prolific young-adult writer whose other ventures include long-running YouTube channels, charities and a brief stint as a chaplain.
Why does John Green live Indianapolis? ‘You gotta live somewhere’
Though born in Indianapolis, Green grew up in Florida before attending Kenyon College in Ohio. After graduating in 2000, he lived in Chicago and then New York City until his wife, Sarah, took a position as a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2007. Green and his family have resided in Indianapolis ever since, and Green’s hits “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down” take place here.
According to a TikTok Green posted in 2022, he and his wife asked the employee at the U-Haul store what he thought of Indianapolis after they finished moving in. “Well, you gotta live somewhere,” that employee said. Almost two decades later, Green said he and his wife have “fallen in love” with the Circle City. “All things considered, this ain’t bad,” he said in the clip.
Green hasn’t shied away from participating in public life, especially when his work became the focus of a local library dispute that made headlines. When Hamilton East Public Library moved “The Fault in Our Stars” from its teen section to its adult section as one of several books to be moved or taken from shelves entirely, Green wrote a letter to the board imploring it to walk back the “awful policy.”
“It’s political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order, and it’s an awful way to have Fishers and Noblesville make national news,” Green said in the letter. “I am so disappointed that you would use public time and public resources to engage in work that actively harms the public through censorship, defacto and otherwise.”
The library has since placed “The Fault in Our Stars” back in the teen section.
John Green was almost a minister
Before he found his calling as a writer, Green briefly aspired to a life in the clergy. He pursued a career as an Episcopalian minister after graduating from Kenyon College and spent around six months as a chaplain at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
The stint helped Green realize that he “wasn’t cut out for it,” and he pivoted to a job as an editorial assistant at the book review magazine Booklist shortly after leaving the hospital. While there, he became inspired to write and drafted his first novel “Looking for Alaska.”
“I realized that…all of these fancy theological ideas that I had from reading lots of theology books didn’t really matter much when it came time to be with kids who were dying, or when it came time to be with families who had just lost their children,” Green told HuffPost in 2015. “All of that complicated theology sort of fell by the wayside for me.”
Not just YA books: John Green writes nonfiction, too
Though Green is primarily known for young adult fiction books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Looking for Alaska,” he also has a pair of nonfiction works to his name. He published “The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet” in 2021 and “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” in 2025. The former is a personal essay collection that rates different human experiences on a five-star scale, and the latter is an exploration of tuberculosis told through one patient.
The pair of books were inspired by Green’s ventures outside of fiction writing, namely his podcast “The Anthropocene Reviewed” and his advocacy for global health reform. He began seriously considering nonfiction writing after publishing “Turtles All the Way Down,” his last fiction book before “Hollywood, Ending” published in 2017.
Catch John Green on YouTube as one half of the ‘vlogbrothers’
In 2007, Green and his brother, Hank Green, stopped texting each other entirely and instead began communicating through vlogs posted to YouTube. Those videos became the vlogbrothers YouTube channel, which has grown to more than 2,000 videos and 4 million subscribers. The brothers post twice a week and discuss science, art, current events, philosophy and their personal lives.
The Green brothers also launched Crash Course, an educational YouTube channel that provides entertaining deep dives into a range of school subjects like physics and literature. That enterprise has since expanded to Complexly, an educational media company that the Green brothers run with dozens of channels under its umbrella. John and Hank Green also host the “Dear Hank and John” advice podcast.
Decreasing worldwide suck: John Green’s philanthropic efforts
Branching from the vlogbrothers’ fanbase of “nerdfighters” who aim to “decrease the overall worldwide level of suck,” Green and his brother founded the Foundation to Decrease World Suck in 2012. Since then, the organization has awarded more than $17 million in grants to charities and launched the annual Project for Awesome, a 48-hour telethon-style livestream that allows viewers to nominate philanthropic organizations.
Green has been a vocal advocate of public health, which inspired “Everything is Tuberculosis.” In 2024, he announced that his family will donate $1 million each year to fund tuberculosis research and treatment in the Philippines.
Contact IndyStar Pop Culture Reporter Heather Bushman at hbushman@indystar.com. Follow her on X @hmb_1013.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Nerdfighters, tuberculosis and ministry: 5 things to know about John Green
Reporting by Heather Bushman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
