Jonathan Lethem says he is “constantly credited as having been born in Brooklyn because it makes more sense to people.” So, for the record, Mr. Lethem – author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” Boerum Hill resident, and self-described “mascot writer for the neighborhood” – was born in Manhattan. He moved to Brooklyn when he was 4 and now lives on Bergen Street, around the corner from the house in which he was raised.

Mr. Lethem’s first four novels were experiments in form that didn’t dwell on his Brooklyn upbringing. In 1997’s “As She Climbed Across the Table,” a professor journeys down a black hole in order to save the particle physicist he loves. The 1998 novel “Girl in Landscape” is a Western genre story set on another planet.

Both were enthusiastically received by a small but devoted coterie of fans. It was “Motherless Brooklyn,” a 1999 mystery set in the borough and starring a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, that ushered him into the land of the Serious Well Known Novelists.

Mr. Lethem sold the film rights to the story several years ago and has no idea when it might actually make it to the screen. Edward Norton is expected to write the screenplay, star in, and direct the project.

“I just get an occasional phone call from the agents, who always tell me that it’s going great,” Mr. Lethem notes wryly, “but that’s all they ever tell me about anything.”

The book “Fortress” was published in 2003 to even wider acclaim. The novel is set on Dean Street during the 1970s. Its protagonist is Dylan Ebdus, a sensitive white boy who moves into the newly named Boerum Hill (formerly Gowanus). His parents see themselves as bohemian pioneers into the African-American neighborhood.

“Fortress” delves deep into 1970s music, superhero comic books, experimental film, and graffiti lore. It is so steepe in facts that Mr. Lethem employed an assistant to help him do “the silly, scruplous stuff of generating lists of songs the were on the radio and films that were in t theaters and famous crimes that were the headlines.”

Mr. Lethem’s brother, Blake, helped the graffiti research. In Mr. Lethem’s words, his younger sibling is “a famous – or notorious, depending on how you regard graffiti – graffiti artist.” On the spray-paint scene, he is known as Keo.

Howard Dean used his work as a backdrop for a 2003 campaign rally in Bryant Park. The piece drew bluster from the City Council and from Mayor Bloomberg, who was quoted as saying that Mr. Dean was “romanticiz[ing] a form of vandalism.” (Later that year, Blake was arrested after a vandalism investigator saw his photograph in a Daily News story about the dust-up and recognized him from a 1999 video of a subway vandalism episode.)

Mr. Lethem’s father, Richard, is also a visual artist, a painter who lives in Maine. In “Fortress,” Dylan’s father, Abraham, is a frustrated painter who takes to illustrating science-fiction book covers. He says that his father “spent his entire career basically doing something else to support his art.”

Thus while working at San Francisco’s used bookstores in his 20s, Mr. Lethem was primed to keep at his writing, despite his tempered expectations for success.

He had left Brooklyn to attend Bennington College in Vermont, intending to study painting. Halfway through his freshman year, he started writing a novel that was “an unholy marriage of Richard Brautigan and Philip K. Dick.” It quickly consumed his time. “I finished the book,” he says now. “What I didn’t finish was college.” (“I guess I’m kind of angling for the honorary degree at this point,” he says with a laugh when asked if he ever considers pursuing a bachelor’s.)

He dropped out as a sophomore and landed in Berkeley. Though classmates like Bret Easton Ellis were using their college connections to build careers, he broke away from his Bennington contacts.

“My image of the writer came from people like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, who didn’t seem to come from within any official structure,” he explains. “They ran away to some garret and just wrote a novel, so I thought that’s what you have to do, that’s the pure act.”

His first novel, “Gun, With Occasional Music,” was published 10 years ago when he was 30. He still works with the same agent, Richard Parks, who helped him ink his first contract.

His latest book is the recently published short-story collection “Men and Cartoons.” In it, a spray bottle makes lost objects appear as salmon-colored ghosts, a writer chats with a suicidal sheep, and an aging superhero serves as the Walt Whitman Chair in Humanities at an East Coast college.

An essay collection titled “The Disappointment Artist” is due out in March. And he is at work on yet another novel, this one about a rock band and set in California. “This book, even though nothing fantastic occurs in it, has a tone that’s kind of freewheeling and bizarre,” he says. “For me there’s always kind of an imaginative element whether or not it’s an explicit device or not.”

After living for a decade in California and writing three more novels, Mr. Lethem moved back to New York in the late 1990s. It’s hard for him now to imagine leaving again. “It’s an odd thing if I ever think about moving out of Brooklyn, either into Manhattan or just being elsewhere. It’s not so much a responsibility to anyone else, but I do feel there’s a kind of personal journey that came back and reclaimed this place.” Mr. Lethem will connect with fellow Brooklynites when he reads from his work at the Brooklyn Public Library this Saturday at 2 p.m.

He still recalls how comforting it felt to return home. “The first book I wrote when I came back, ‘Motherless Brooklyn,’ is kind of a valentine to where I’m from – just the energy and the talk and the sarcastic intensity of the personalities that I was craving after a while in California. I was really pining for it.”