George Saunders

Last updated

George Saunders
George Saunders at 2023 National Book Festival (53123054136) (cropped).jpg
Saunders in 2023
Born (1958-12-02) December 2, 1958 (age 65)
Amarillo, Texas, U.S.
Occupation
  • Writer
  • journalist
  • college professor
LanguageEnglish
Education
Period1986–present [lower-alpha 1]
Notable works
Notable awards
SpousePaula Redick [1]
Children2 [2]
Website
www.georgesaundersbooks.com

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's , McSweeney's , and GQ . He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian 's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008. [3]

Contents

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship and won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". [4]

His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award [5] and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections [6] and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize. [7] [8] His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Booker Prize. [9]

Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago, attended St. Damian Catholic School and graduated from Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois. He spent some of his early twenties working as a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller. [10] [11] In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Of his scientific background, Saunders has said, "any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses." [12]

In 1988, he was awarded an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he worked with Tobias Wolff. [13] At Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, a fellow writer, whom he married. Saunders recalled, "we [got] engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands". [1]

Of his influences, [13] Saunders has written:

I really love Russian writers, especially from the 19th and early 20th Century: Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel. I love the way they take on the big topics. I'm also inspired by a certain absurdist comic tradition that would include influences like Mark Twain, Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve Martin, Jack Handey, etc. And then, on top of that, I love the strain of minimalist American fiction writing: Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff. [14]

Career

Background and work

From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s. [11] [15]

Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program while continuing to publish fiction and nonfiction. [13] [16] In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope College's Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007. [17]

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media. Many reviewers mention his writing's satirical tone, but his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work has inspired him. [18]

Ben Stiller bought the film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in the late 1990s; as of 2007, the project was in development by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions. [19] Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on his short story "Sea Oak". [20]

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but now views the philosophy unfavorably, likening it to neoconservatism. [21] He is a student of Nyingma Buddhism. [2]

Awards

Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times: in 1994, for "The 400-Pound CEO" (published in Harper's ); in 1996, for "Bounty" (also published in Harper's); in 2000, for "The Barber's Unhappiness" (published in The New Yorker ); and in 2004, for "The Red Bow" (published in Esquire ). [22] Saunders won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Falls", initially published in the January 22, 1996, issue of The New Yorker . [23] [24]

His first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline , was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. [25]

In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation. [26]

In 2006, Saunders was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [27] Also that year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship; [28] his short-story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize; [29] and he won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for his short story "CommComm", first published in the August 1, 2005, issue of The New Yorker . [30] [4]

In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. [31] [32] In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [33]

In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. [34] His short-story collection Tenth of December won the 2013 Story Prize. [6] The collection also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, "the first major English-language book prize open to writers from around the world". [7] [35] [36] [8] The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award [37] and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2013" by the editors of the New York Times Book Review . [38] In a January 2013 cover story, The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year". [39] One of the stories in the collection, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist. [40]

In 2017, Saunders published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , which won the Booker Prize and was a New York Times bestseller.

Awards and honors

YearTitleAwardCategoryResultRef
1994"The 400-Pound CEO" National Magazine Award FictionWon
1996"Bounty" National Magazine Award Won
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline PEN/Hemingway Award Shortlisted
1997"The Falls" O. Henry Awards 2nd prize
2000"The Barber's Unhappiness" National Magazine Award FictionWon
2003"The Red Bow" Bram Stoker Award Short Fiction Shortlisted
2004 National Magazine Award FictionWon
2006 In Persuasion Nation The Story Prize Shortlisted
"CommComm" World Fantasy Award Short Story Won
2011"Home" Bram Stoker Award Short Fiction Shortlisted
2013 Tenth of December: Stories Goodreads Choice Award Fiction10th
The Story Prize Won
2014 National Book Award for Fiction Shortlisted
The Writers' Prize Won
2017 Lincoln in the Bardo Booker Prize Won
2018 Locus Award First Novel Nom (4th)
Premio Gregor von Rezzori Won
2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Won [41] [42] [43]

Other honors

Selected works

Story collections

Novels

Nonfiction

Essays and reporting

Anthologies

Interviews

Other

TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collectedNotes
I can speak!™1999Saunders, George (June 21–28, 1999). "I can speak!™". The New Yorker.
  • In Persuasion Nation
  • Saunders, George (December 30, 2019). "I can speak!™". The New Yorker. Vol. 95, no. 42. pp. 57–58.
Often acclaimed as among his best short stories. [50] [51]
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip 2000Children's book
"Four Institutional Monologues"2000 McSweeney's 4th story included in In Persuasion Nation Originally released as a booklet [52]
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil 2005Novella
"Fox 8" [53] 2013, 2018Fox 8 (2018)First released as an e-book in 2013, the story was later published in hardcover by Random House in 2018. [54]
"A Two-Minute Note to the Future"2014Aphoristic essay on brown paper Chipotle bag. [55]
"Love Letter"2020The New Yorker, April 6, 2020 The Best American Short Stories 2021
"Thursday"2023The New Yorker [56]

Notes

  1. In the "Author's Note" to the 2012 paperback reprint of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders writes about an early story he published in 1986, titled "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room," which he (quote): "used it to get into Syracuse. This story was originally published in Northwest Review , Volume 24, Number 2, in 1986."

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References

  1. 1 2 Saunders, George. "My Writing Education: A Time Line". The New Yorker. Retrieved October 26, 2015.
  2. 1 2 Lovell, Joel (January 3, 2013). "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year". The New York Times. The New York Times Magazine.
  3. "American psyche | Life and style". The Guardian. Retrieved October 18, 2017.
  4. 1 2 World Fantasy Convention (2010). "Award Winners and Nominees". Archived from the original on December 1, 2010. Retrieved February 4, 2011.
  5. "Saunders Wins PEN/Malamud Award". Pw.org. Archived from the original on May 5, 2013. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
  6. 1 2 Dark, Larry (March 5, 2014). "TSP: George Saunders Wins His First Book Award, The Story Prize, for Tenth of December". The Story Prize (Press release). Retrieved September 25, 2022.
  7. 1 2 Ron Charles (March 10, 2014). "George Saunders wins $67,000 for first Folio Prize". Washington Post . Retrieved March 11, 2014.
  8. 1 2 "Tenth of December by George Saunders wins inaugural Folio Prize 2014" (PDF). Folio Prize. March 10, 2014. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 11, 2014. Retrieved March 11, 2014.
  9. "Booker winner took 20 years to write". bbc.com. October 18, 2017.
  10. Dankowski, Terra (September 1, 2022). "Newsmaker: George Saunders". American Libraries . Retrieved September 25, 2022.
  11. 1 2 Miller, Laura (April 26, 2000). "Knuckle-puller makes good". Salon.com . Retrieved November 20, 2022.
  12. Childers, Doug (July 1, 2000). "The Wag Chats with George Saunders". The Wag. Retrieved June 4, 2007.
  13. 1 2 3 Enslin, Rob (May 24, 2022). "Writing a Legacy". Syracuse University . Retrieved November 20, 2022.
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  15. "Ayn Rand is for children". Salon.com. January 19, 2013. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
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  47. Promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies to accompany the book In persuasion nation
  48. Convocation speech delivered at Syracuse University for the class of 2013
  49. Online version is titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?".
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