Amor Towles
Amor Towles was born in 1964 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in the Boston area before attending Yale University for his undergraduate education. He then earned a master’s degree in English from Stanford University, where he developed the deep engagement with literary tradition—particularly the great novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that would shape the character of his own fiction. Rather than pursuing an academic or conventional literary career directly, Towles spent two decades working in the investment business in New York City, rising to a senior position while writing fiction on the side. This unusual professional trajectory—Wall Street rather than MFA programs and writers’ residencies—may account for something in the quality of his fiction: a certain worldly polish, a pleasure in craft and elegance, an interest in how institutions and social codes shape individual lives.
Towles published his debut novel, Rules of Civility (2011), at the age of forty-seven, after years of writing in the early mornings before the workday began. Set in New York City in 1938 and narrated by a young woman from a working-class background navigating the social world of Manhattan’s upper classes, the novel was praised for its wit, its period atmosphere, and the clarity and elegance of its prose. It became a word-of-mouth success and introduced readers to a writer who seemed to have arrived fully formed, with a distinctive voice and an unusual commitment to the pleasures of storytelling as an art.
His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), available on Writers Review, is the book that brought Towles global recognition. The novel follows Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat condemned by a Bolshevik tribunal to lifetime house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. Unable to leave, yet able to live with great interior richness and deliberate grace over the following decades, the Count witnesses Russia moving from Bolshevism through Stalinism and beyond. The novel is a celebration of civilization—of art, literature, conversation, fine food, and the human capacity for adaptation and joy under constraint—rendered through a hero of irrepressible wit, decency, and charm. It became one of the most beloved literary novels of its decade, selling millions of copies worldwide. His third novel, The Lincoln Highway (2021), also available on Writers Review, is set in 1950s America and follows two brothers whose attempt to drive cross-country is hijacked by the arrival of two escapees from a work farm.
Towles writes in a style deliberately reminiscent of the great European and American novelists of the early twentieth century—Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy, P.G. Wodehouse—while being unmistakably contemporary in its self-awareness. His prose is elegant without being precious, humorous without being lightweight, and morally serious without being preachy. He is particularly gifted at constructing plots of satisfying formal elegance—novels in which everything comes together at the end with the satisfaction of a well-executed piece of music.
Amor Towles has achieved the unusual distinction of writing literary fiction that is simultaneously highly regarded by critics and genuinely beloved by a vast popular readership. His books are passed between friends, assigned in book clubs, and read with the kind of intense pleasure that feels increasingly rare in an age of distraction. He lives in New York City and continues to write fiction that makes the strongest possible case for the novel as an instrument of humane wisdom and delight.
