THE WD INTERVIEW Amor Towles
Amor Towles didn’t one day decide to quit his job in the financial sector to try his hand at novel writing. Quite the opposite, really. He began writing when he was a child and followed that passion to Yale, where he studied under the visiting professor and novelist Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen encouraged Towles, who realized, “What I’ve imagined could come true. My dream of being a writer is not just me being crazy. My sense that I could do this well, is not crazy.”
Following his time at Yale, Towles then earned an MA in English from Stanford, where he worked closely with novelist, poet, and literary critic Gilbert Sorrentino.
From there, his career path took a left turn as he joined a friend who started an investment firm. Towles kept Matthiessen’s dismay in the back of his mind, recalling him saying, “I personally spent time with you, hopefully mentoring you toward becoming a writer, so it’s a personal disappointment.” Towles’s fear was “that I would fail to return to fiction.”
Neither Towles nor Matthiessen needn’t have worried. Towles returned to fiction after 10 years, writing two international bestsellers: Rules of Civility (2011) about a single, Midwestern woman making her way in New York City in the 1930s, and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) about Count Alexander Rostov, sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest inside the Metropol Hotel in Soviet Russia. These novels are marked by elegant prose, richly drawn descriptions, and layered characters who experience life deeply.
Towles talked with WD about the importance of the mastery
