Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and called by some critics the "Great American Novel". In 2022, it was announced that Freedom would be adapted for television.

The novel follows the lives of the Berglund family, particularly the parents Patty and Walter, as their lives develop and their happiness eventually falls apart. Important to their story is a college friend of Walter's and successful rock musician, Richard Katz, who has an affair with Patty. Walter and Patty's son, Joey, also goes through his own coming-of-age challenges.

Franzen began working on the novel in 2001, following his successful novel The Corrections. The title of the novel was an artifact of his book proposal, where he wanted to write a novel that freed him from the constraints of his previous work. The cover of many editions of the novel includes a cerulean warbler, a songbird, for which Walter works to create an environmental preserve.

The novel opens with the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. One of the first families to move back into urban St. Paul after years of white flight, the Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal liberal middle-class family. Walter Berglund is a mild-mannered environmentalist lawyer, and his wife Patty is a charming and youthful homemaker who cares for their two children, Jessica and Joey. The precocious Joey’s move to his girlfriend’s Republican family next door increasingly destabilizes Patty and Walter’s marriage. Years later, while the children are at college, the unhappy couple relocates to Washington, D.C.

The second section of the novel is a story-within-a-story, presented as an autobiography written by Patty at her therapist's suggestion. She recalls her youth as a star basketball player, her alienation from her busy parents and artistic siblings, and being raped at a party. After receiving a varsity scholarship to the University of Minnesota, her disturbed friend, Eliza, draws her into contact with the attractive Macalester rocker Richard Katz and his kind-hearted, nerdy roommate, Walter Berglund.

After detaching herself from Eliza and suffering a career-ending injury, Patty unsuccessfully attempts to woo Richard. When he rejects her advances, she settles down instead with Walter, who has been patiently courting her for a year. They marry and raise their family for many happy years, but begin to suffer marital problems as Joey and Jessica become adolescents. Joey moves out of the house and in with his childhood girlfriend Connie next door, worsening Patty’s spiral into alcoholism and depression. Meanwhile, Richard struggles with fluctuating artistic success and abandons his music career. Twenty years after leaving college, Patty and Richard have a brief affair at the Berglunds' vacation house at an unnamed lake in Minnesota.

The third section of the novel jumps to the early 2000s, and alternates in viewpoint among Richard, Joey, and Walter.

By 2004, a middle-aged Richard has found success as a minor indie rock star with breakthrough album Nameless Lake, secretly inspired by his affair. Walter starts working for an environmental organization in Washington D.C., the Cerulean Mountain Trust, which is supported by the coal industry and aims to strip mine parts of West Virginia, eventually turning the denuded land into a cerulean warbler preserve. Walter attempts to enlist Richard in his anti-human overpopulation pet project, which he is funding with Cerulean Trust money.