George Saunders

Based on Wikipedia: George Saunders

The Knuckle-Puller Who Became a Literary Giant

Before George Saunders became one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation, he spent time pulling knuckles in a slaughterhouse. He also worked as a roofer in Chicago and a doorman in Beverly Hills. These weren't gap-year adventures or material-gathering exercises for some future memoir. They were just jobs, the kind you take in your twenties when you're not quite sure what you're doing with your life.

What makes Saunders unusual isn't that he had an unconventional path to literary success. Plenty of writers have worked strange jobs. What makes him unusual is that before any of this, he earned a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. He then worked for years as a technical writer and geophysical engineer, including a stint with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra.

This matters because Saunders has built one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction, and that voice emerged from a brain trained to think about rocks and oil deposits and technical specifications. As he once put it, describing his scientific background's influence on his fiction:

"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."

That self-deprecating metaphor captures something essential about his work. His stories feel like they were made by someone approaching fiction from an angle, someone who never quite internalized the conventional rules about what literary stories are supposed to do.

A Fast Engagement and a Slow Rise

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, but grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, a suburb south of Chicago. He attended Catholic school, graduated from the local high school, then headed to Colorado for his engineering degree in 1981.

Seven years later, he enrolled in Syracuse University's Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. There he studied with Tobias Wolff, one of the most respected short story writers and memoirists of his generation. Wolff would become a lasting influence and, in Saunders's own telling of his literary lineage, part of a tradition of minimalist American fiction writers including Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver.

But Syracuse gave Saunders something else too. He met Paula Redick, a fellow writer in the program. They got engaged in three weeks.

Saunders has joked that this remains a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record. Whether or not that's true, the speed suggests something about his temperament: when he knows, he knows.

After Syracuse, he didn't immediately become a full-time writer. He went back to technical work, spending seven years at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He was writing on the side, developing the strange, satirical voice that would eventually make him famous. But for most of that decade, he was an engineer who wrote fiction, not a fiction writer who used to be an engineer.

The Voice

When you read George Saunders, you know you're reading George Saunders. His fiction operates in a register that's hard to describe but instantly recognizable: darkly funny, deeply humane, set in worlds that feel like funhouse-mirror versions of contemporary America.

His characters often work in theme parks or corporate environments with Kafkaesque rules. They speak in a kind of degraded corporate-speak, full of euphemisms and empty jargon. The settings are absurd, but the emotional lives of the people inside them are rendered with startling tenderness.

This combination of satirical bite and genuine compassion has earned Saunders frequent comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut. Like Vonnegut, he uses science fiction and satirical premises to ask moral and philosophical questions. Like Vonnegut, he's funny in ways that make you slightly uncomfortable. And like Vonnegut, beneath the irony, there's an earnest concern for human beings and how we treat each other.

Saunders himself has described his influences as coming from three different streams. First, the great Russians: Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Isaac Babel. He loves how they take on what he calls "the big topics" without embarrassment. Second, an absurdist comic tradition that runs from Mark Twain through Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve Martin, and Jack Handey. Third, that line of minimalist American fiction: Anderson, Hemingway, Carver, Wolff.

Mix a nineteenth-century Russian moral seriousness with Monty Python's sense of the absurd and Carver's stripped-down prose style, and you start to get a sense of what Saunders is doing.

The Recognition

Saunders's first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, appeared in 1996. The title story is set in a Civil War theme park that's falling apart and overrun with violent teenagers. It's a quintessential Saunders premise: take something already a bit absurd about American culture, push it a few degrees further, and see what happens to the people caught inside.

The collection was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, given to distinguished first books of fiction. It also caught the attention of Hollywood; Ben Stiller bought the film rights, though the project never made it to the screen.

More collections followed. Pastoralia in 2000. In Persuasion Nation in 2006. Along the way, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction four times, in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, for stories published in Harper's, The New Yorker, and Esquire. He was becoming one of the most celebrated short story writers in America, even as the short story itself was supposedly dying as a commercial form.

In 1997, he joined the faculty at Syracuse University, returning to the school where he'd gotten his MFA to teach in the same program. He's been there ever since.

The major institutional recognitions came in 2006. That year, Saunders received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. The MacArthur, sometimes called the "genius grant," comes with five hundred thousand dollars and no strings attached. It's given to people who have shown exceptional creativity and the promise of more to come.

Also in 2006, his short story "CommComm" won the World Fantasy Award. This might seem surprising for a writer usually classified as literary fiction, but Saunders's work has always had one foot in genre territory. His worlds are often slightly science fictional, with technological or social premises pushed just past the point of current reality.

Tenth of December

In 2013, Saunders published Tenth of December, the collection that would cement his reputation as a master of the form.

The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story declaring it "the best book you'll read this year." The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of 2013. It won The Story Prize, the most prestigious award for short story collections. It won the inaugural Folio Prize, a British award open to all fiction in English. Saunders also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story that year.

The collection contains ten stories that showcase the full range of Saunders's capabilities. There are near-future dystopias and small-town tragedies. There are stories told from the perspective of pharmaceutical test subjects and stories about suburban parents and their children. What unifies them is Saunders's characteristic combination of humor, strangeness, and moral urgency.

One story from the collection, "Home," was even a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, given for horror fiction. Again, Saunders resists easy categorization.

The Novel

For years, the question hanging over Saunders's career was whether he would ever write a novel. He was clearly a master of the short form, but in American literary culture, the novel still carries a certain prestige that short stories don't. Could he sustain his voice over a longer narrative? Would he even try?

In 2017, he answered both questions with Lincoln in the Bardo.

The novel is set over a single night in 1862, in the Georgetown cemetery where Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie has just been buried. Lincoln, grief-stricken, visits the cemetery and holds his son's body. Around him, unbeknownst to the living president, are ghosts, dozens of them, trapped in the bardo.

The bardo is a concept from Tibetan Buddhism, the in-between state that follows death but precedes whatever comes next. The ghosts in Saunders's novel don't know they're dead. They believe they're merely sick and will soon recover. They refer to their coffins as "sick-boxes." They're trapped by their inability to accept their own deaths and move on.

Saunders, who practices Nyingma Buddhism, a school of Tibetan Buddhism, brought his own spiritual practice into this novel. But the book is less about Buddhist doctrine than about grief, loss, and the difficulty of letting go. It's also, surprisingly, about America on the verge of the Civil War's bloodiest years, about Lincoln's growing awareness that the war to preserve the Union might also become a war to end slavery.

The novel is formally experimental. It's told entirely through fragments: quotes from historical sources (some real, some invented), and the voices of the ghosts themselves. There's no conventional narrator, no continuous prose. It reads almost like a play or a collage.

Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in English-language fiction. It became a New York Times bestseller. Saunders, at nearly sixty, had finally written a novel, and it was unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

The Teacher

Since 1997, Saunders has been teaching in Syracuse's MFA program, helping to train the next generation of fiction writers. Many of his former students have gone on to significant careers of their own.

In 2021, he published A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book that grew out of his teaching. The subtitle explains the premise: "In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life." The book closely analyzes seven short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, explaining why they work and what they can teach contemporary writers.

It's a craft book, but also a book about how to pay attention, how to read carefully, how to think about the decisions writers make on every page. It became a bestseller, reaching readers far beyond the usual audience for books about writing.

In 2013, Saunders gave a commencement address at Syracuse that went viral. It was later published as a small book called Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. The speech argued that what he most regretted in his life were failures of kindness, moments when he could have been more generous to others but wasn't. It struck a chord.

This concern with kindness, with how we treat each other, runs through all of Saunders's work. His satire is never merely satirical. It's always asking: given how strange and difficult the world is, how should we live? How should we treat each other? What does it mean to be a good person in a system that seems designed to make goodness difficult?

The Philosophy

Saunders has been open about his intellectual and spiritual journey. In his twenties, he was an Objectivist, a follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. He has since moved far from that position, now viewing Objectivism unfavorably and comparing it to neoconservatism.

Instead, he practices Nyingma Buddhism. Nyingma is the oldest of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, tracing its origins back to the eighth century. It emphasizes direct experience and meditation practice over scholastic study. The bardo concept that structures his novel comes from this tradition.

But you don't need to know anything about Buddhism to understand Saunders's fiction. His moral concerns are universal: compassion versus selfishness, kindness versus cruelty, the difficulty of seeing other people clearly when we're trapped inside our own heads.

The Recognition Continues

Saunders has continued to publish and collect honors. His story collection Liberation Day appeared in 2022. A new novel, Vigil, is scheduled for 2026.

In 2025, the National Book Foundation announced that Saunders would receive its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This is one of the highest honors in American literature, recognizing a lifetime of achievement. Past recipients include Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. He's received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and too many literary magazines and foundations to list.

The Work

Here's what George Saunders has published:

His short story collections are CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), Tenth of December (2013), and Liberation Day (2022). The first two also contain novellas alongside the stories.

His longer fiction includes the novellas The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) and Fox 8 (2018), and the novels Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and the forthcoming Vigil (2026).

His nonfiction includes The Braindead Megaphone (2007), a collection of essays, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), his book about Russian short stories and the craft of fiction. There's also the viral commencement speech, Congratulations, by the Way (2014).

He's written one children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000).

And throughout his career, he's contributed fiction, essays, and journalism to The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, GQ, Esquire, and many other publications. He wrote a regular column called "American Psyche" for The Guardian's weekend magazine from 2006 to 2008.

The Legacy

George Saunders came to fiction through an unusual door. Engineering school, oil exploration in Sumatra, slaughterhouse work, technical writing. By the time he arrived at Syracuse for his MFA at age thirty, he'd lived a life very different from the typical aspiring literary writer.

That outsider background gave him permission to write stories that didn't look like conventional literary fiction. His theme-park satires, his near-future dystopias, his corporate hellscapes, his talking lawn ornaments: none of this fit comfortably into the realist tradition that dominated American short fiction in the late twentieth century.

But within those strange premises, Saunders has always been interested in the oldest questions. How do we live? How do we treat each other? What does kindness look like in a world that doesn't always reward it?

He found a way to be both experimental and accessible, both satirical and tender, both funny and deadly serious. He built one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary American literature. And he did it while teaching hundreds of young writers at Syracuse, passing on what he'd learned about the craft.

The welder, it turns out, designed some remarkable dresses.