Wells Tower

Last updated
Wells Tower
Born (1973-04-14) April 14, 1973 (age 51)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
OccupationWriter
Education Wesleyan University (BA),
Columbia University (MFA)
Notable worksEverything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Notable awards The Paris Review Plimpton (Discovery) Prize, two Pushcart Prizes

Wells Tower (born April 14, 1973) is an American writer of short stories, non-fiction, feature films and television. In 2009 he published his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to much critical acclaim. His short fiction has also been published in The New Yorker , The Paris Review , McSweeney's , Vice , Harper's Magazine , A Public Space , Fence and other periodicals. In 2022, he wrote the screenplay for the feature film Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and directed by David Yates, which was bought by Netflix for $50 million.

Contents

Early life, education, and early career

Tower was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but grew up in North Carolina. [1] [2] He played guitar in the punk band Hellbender for six years beginning his senior year of high school. [3]

He received a B.A. in anthropology and sociology from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. [4] After graduating from Wesleyan, he traveled around the United States doing odd jobs. [5] He began his professional career when he convinced an editor at The Washington Post Magazine to publish an article about a carnival worker. [5]

Tower is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the 2002 Plimpton (Discovery) Prize from The Paris Review , [6] and a Henfield Foundation Award.

Writing career

Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Tower's first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009. [7] The book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Edmund White and in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani. [5] Kakutani picked it as one of her ten best books of 2009. [8] It was also a finalist for The Story Prize. The short story from which the collection's title is taken is about a community of Vikings growing older.

In June 2010, Tower was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. [9] [10] On June 10, 2010, he was presented with the Tenth Annual New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize for an American writer under 40. [11]

His work was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2010 . [12] [13] Since 2010, his nonfiction reporting has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing three times, for "Own Goal" (2011), originally published in Harper's Magazine and a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing; "Welcome to the Far East Conference" (2012), originally published in GQ ; and "Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?" (2015), also originally published in GQ .

In 2014, Tower was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards in Essays and Criticism for "The Old Man at Burning Man" and in Fiction for "The Dance Contest." [14]

On May 22, 2022, Netflix paid $50 million for global rights to the conspiracy film Pain Hustlers, written by Tower, directed by David Yates, and starring Emily Blunt. Tower's original screenplay was inspired by Evan Hughes’ nonfiction book The Hard Sell, which was published January 2022. [15]

Tower’s unproduced screenwriting credits include The True American for director Kathryn Bigelow and Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures, and Framed for George Clooney's Smokehouse Productions and Netflix. His unproduced television writing credits include the dramatic series Paper for Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and HBO, and the series Mayor for Alec Baldwin and HBO. [16]

Personal life

As of 2009, Tower divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York. [17]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Foster Wallace</span> American writer (1962–2008)

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".

Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Marcus</span> American author and professor

Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Gates (author)</span> American novelist

David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His works have been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Magazine Awards</span> American accolade for print and digital publications

The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium. They are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in association with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and are administered by ASME in New York City. The awards have been presented annually since 1966.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Beattie</span> American novelist and short story writer

Ann Beattie is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michiko Kakutani</span> American critic, writer (b. 1955)

Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Rush</span> American writer

Norman Rush is an American writer most of whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He won the U.S. National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.

Larry Curtis Heinemann was an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His published work – three novels and a memoir – is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War.

James Wilcox is an American novelist and a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale. Wilcox was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.

Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Johnson (writer)</span> American novelist and short story writer (born 1967)

Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.

Richard Rayner is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles.

<i>Emporium</i> (short story collection)

Emporium is the debut short-story collection by San Francisco writer and Stanford University Jones Lecturer Adam Johnson. Emporium collected nine stories that previously appeared in American literary journals and magazines. Penguin published the paperback edition in 2003. Translated into French, Japanese, Serbian, German and Catalan, Emporium was named “Debut of the Year” by Amazon.com. Described as a “remarkable debut” by the New Yorker and “The Arrival of a talented new writer” by the New York Times, Johnson’s Emporium was nominated for a Young Lions Fiction Award by the New York Public Library. According to Daniel Mendelsohn, writing for New York Magazine, “Johnson's oh-so-slightly futuristic flights of fancy, his vaguely Blade Runner–esque visions of a cluttered, anaerobic American culture, illustrate something very real, very current: the way we must embrace the unknown, take risks, in order to give flavor and meaning to life.”

<i>The Lost City of Z</i> (book) 2009 book by David Grann

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z". In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.

<i>The Pale King</i> 2011 novel by David Foster Wallace

The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his death. Before his suicide in 2008, Wallace organized the manuscript and associated computer files in a place where they would be found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Hawes (author)</span>

Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Hawes is an American writer of biography, journalism and creative non-fiction.

<i>CivilWarLand in Bad Decline</i> Collection of George Saunders short stories published 1992-1995

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is a book of short stories and a novella by the American writer George Saunders. Published in 1996, it was Saunders's first book. Many of the stories initially appeared in different forms in various magazines, including Kenyon Review, Harper's, The New Yorker and Quarterly West. The collection was listed as a Notable Book of 1996 by The New York Times, as well as a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.

<i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank</i> 2012 short story collection by Nathan Englander

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is a 2012 short story collection by the American writer Nathan Englander. The book was first published on February 7, 2012, through Knopf and collects eight of Englander's short stories, including the title story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank."

<i>Pain Hustlers</i> 2023 film by David Yates

Pain Hustlers is a 2023 American crime drama film co-produced and directed by David Yates from a screenplay by Wells Tower, based on the 2022 book of the same name by Evan Hughes. The film stars Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O'Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d'Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman. Its plot centers on a high school dropout who lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical company in Central Florida, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy.

References

  1. "Author Wells Tower Shares His Hatred of the Internet, His Love of Action Plots, and an Old Norse Recipe". Huffpost New York. June 10, 2010. Retrieved June 11, 2011.
  2. Varno, David (April 2009). "An Interview with Wells Tower". Bookslut. Retrieved June 11, 2011.
  3. Neyfakh, Leon (March 2009). "Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy". New York Observer. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  4. Neyfakh, Leon (2009). "Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking For Joy". The New York Observer. Retrieved on March 28, 2009
  5. 1 2 3 Konigsberg, Eric (April 11, 2009). "Witness to Luckless Lives on the Periphery". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-06-11.
  6. "Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists".
  7. White, Edmund (2009). "Review of Everything Ravaged Everything Burned". The New York Times. Retrieved on March 28, 2009.
  8. "Michiko Kakutani's Top 10 Books of 2009". The New York Times . Retrieved April 25, 2010.
  9. Bosman, Julie (June 2, 2010). "20 Young Writers Earn the Envy of Many Others". The New York Times.
  10. ""The Landlord" : The New Yorker". www.newyorker.com. Archived from the original on 2010-09-07.
  11. "Wells Tower Wins The New York Public Library's 2010 Young Lions Fiction Award for his first book Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned". June 11, 2010. Archived from the original on 2011-07-14. Retrieved 2010-06-12.
  12. Peschel, Joseph (October 15, 2010). "Year's best stories have staying power". The Boston Globe.
  13. "Jacket Copy". Los Angeles Times.
  14. American Society of Magazine Editors. March 27, 2014. http://www.magazine.org/about-asme/pressroom/asme-press-releases/asme/national-magazine-awards-2014-finalists-announced Archived 2014-03-30 at the Wayback Machine .
  15. Lang, Brent (May 22, 2022). ""Netflix Swoops In With $50 Million Purchase of Emily Blunt, David Yates Film 'Pain Hustlers'"". Variety.
  16. Grobar, Matt (May 12, 2022). "Emily Blunt to Star in "Pain Hustlers" for director David Yates". Deadline Hollywood.
  17. Baron, Zach (2009). "Spring Guide: Wells Tower Offers a Strange Way to Squeeze a Day". The Village Voice . Retrieved March 28, 2009.