Frontlist | George Saunders shares books that inspired him to be an author

Frontlist | George Saunders shares books that inspired him to be an author
on Jan 27, 2021

Booker prize winning author George Saunders opened up about the books that shaped him in a recent interview. Though he is best known for his book 'Lincoln at the Bardo' which won the 2017 Booker Prize, Saunders has won many awards for his short stories as well. This year he has released a book of essays that examines the writing of popular Russian authors- Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol, titled 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life'. In a recent interview with Elle, he spoke on books that had a big impact on him, and even shared which books helped inspire him to become a writer. He explained, This happened in three phases: 1) A nun I was in love with gave me Johnny Tremain, a stylistic masterpiece by Esther Forbes; 2) I was studying engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and used to obsessively read and reread In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. I loved the tight sentences and also the implied writerly life: traveling around the world and dispassionately observing stuff and definitely, definitely not doing any calculus homework; 3) To get free of the Hemingway-constriction, I found The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek, which made literature three-dimensional and in color for the first time.   Source: Times Of India