Background

George Saunders was born on December 2, 1958, in Amarillo, Texas, the United States to George Robert (a federal employee) and Joan (a federal employee; maiden name, Clarke) Saunders. He grew up in Chicago. He was first introduced to the idea of being a writer by his father, who would bring home books like Machiavelli’s The Prince and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from his work.

Education

Saunders graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in exploration geophysics in 1981. In 1986 Saunders applied to Syracuse University and became a Master of Arts in 1988.

Career

Saunders graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981 and went to work as a geophysical engineer in Sumatra, Indonesia. He traveled widely in Malaysia, Thailand, Russia, and Pakistan and made various unsuccessful attempts to get into Third World war zones so he could write the great Afghan or Cambodian novel and sell it to Hollywood, and so on, but instead, he got a terrific Sumatran virus and began sleeping fifteen hours a night. He returned to the United States and worked as a doorman in Beverly Hills, roofer in Chicago, musician, slaughterhouse laborer, mover, and finally retreated to his parents’ house in Amarillo, Texas, at about twenty-six year of age. He was admitted to the Syracuse creative writing program in 1986.

Saunders had no money and so he worked as a tech writer, first for a pharmaceutical company and then for an environmental engineering company. During this period (1989-1995), he wrote his first book “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” One of the stories from this book, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” ran in The New Yorker in 1992 - the beginning of a long relationship with that magazine.

Since 1996 Saunders taught in the Syracuse Master of Fine Arts program, where he had the privilege of teaching some of the most remarkable young American writers of the last 15 years. He writes short stories for The New Yorker and travel pieces for GQ. He traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton, reported on Nepal’s “Buddha Boy,” gone on patrol with the “Minute Men” on the Mexican border, spent a week in the theme hotels of Dubai, and lived incognito in a homeless tent city in Fresno, California.

In addition to Saunders's new book, “Tenth of December,” he has written three other short story collections "Pastoralia," "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" (both New York Times Notable Books) and, most recently, "In Persuasion Nation." “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. “In Persuasion Nation” was one of three finalists for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year. He has also written a novella-length illustrated fable, "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" the New York Times bestselling children's book, "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip," illustrated by Lane Smith, (which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands), and, most recently, a book of essays, “The Braindead Megaphone.”

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media. While many reviewers mention his writing's satirical tone, 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.

Saunder has also written two screenplays (one of which is in development with Ben Stiller’s company, Red Hour Films) and has collaborated with the playwright Seth Bockley on stage adaptations of two of my stories, “Jon,” and “CommComm.” The director Yehuda Duenyas staged “Pastoralia,” at PS 122, and a musical version of “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” was produced and performed in Austin and Los Angeles.

Saunder's work has appeared in the O’Henry, “Best American Short Story,” “Best Non-Required Reading,” “Best American Travel Writing,” and “Best Science Fiction” anthologies. In support of his books, he appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report.

Saunders has also read and taught in Russia, Belize, England, Amsterdam, Italy, and was a Writer in Residence at DISQUIET, in Portugal.

Achievements

• In 2001, Saunders was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 as one of the best writers "40 and under." In 2006, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
  
  In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. His short-story collection Tenth of December won the 2013 Story Prize. The collection also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, "the first major English-language book prize open to writers from around the world." The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2013" by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.
  
  In a January 2013 cover story, The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year." One of the stories from the collection, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.

Works

More photos

• book

  • In Persuasion Nation

    (Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, ...)

    2006
  • Tenth of December

    (One of the most important and blazingly original writers ...)

    2013
  • CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

    (Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut co...)

    1996
  • The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

    (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a modern fable for...)

    2000
  • Fox 8

    (Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack...)

    2013
  • Congratulations, by the way

    (This inspiring meditation on kindness from the author of ...)

    214
  • The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

    (Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of De...)

    2005
  • Lincoln in the Bardo

    (The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has...)

    2017

Religion

Previously, Saunders was Catholic, but later he changed his denomination and became an Episcopalian.

Views

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

Quotations: "Is America “about” something (love, inclusion, growth) other than material gain?"

"I think that's a kind of American story that I don't see very often in fiction: that naked anxiety about money. Somehow you can talk about sex or religion but when you start talking about money, especially the scarcity of money, it starts to make people uncomfortable."

"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them."

"The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual."

"Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."

"Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."

Membership

Saunders is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014 and inducted as a member in 2018.

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Personality

While working in Sumatra as a field geophysicist, Saunders became ill after swimming in a river that had recently received "deposits" from over one hundred monkeys.

Regarding his influences, 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."

Interests

• Writers

  Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel, Mark Twain, Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve Martin, Jack Handey, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff

Connections

Saunders met his future wife, Paula Redick at Syracuse University, and they got engaged in three weeks. Paula got pregnant on their honeymoon. Their first daughter, Caitlin, was born in 1988, second daughter, Alena, was born in 1990.

Father:

George Robert Saunders

Mother:

Joan (Clarke) Saunders

Spouse:

Paula Redick

Daughter:

Caitlin Saunders

Daughter:

Alena Saunders

Friend:

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.

Saunders and Wolff studied together at Syracuse University.

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 164
  1998
• George Saunders