NEW YORK (AP) — George Saunders’ path from obscurity to acclaim began some 30 years ago, not long after he finished a novel his wife could hardly stand.
“I used to think the job of serious fiction was to be completely impossible to understand,” he explained during a telephone interview. “But one day I just started to work on these Seussian poems, just to have fun with them. I showed them to my wife, and she thought they were very funny, and she said to me it was about time that anybody got enjoyment out of my work.”
“I grew up on TV and ‘Jaws’ and Dick Cavett,” he said. “I valued entertainment and I once thought maybe it didn’t belong in literature. And then I thought, of course it does.”
One of the world’s most highly regarded authors, Saunders has now been welcomed into an elevated — and most dignified — pantheon. The National Book Foundation announced Friday that it has named him this year’s winner of a National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, a lifetime achievement medal given to Toni Morrison,Robert Caro and Edmund White among others. The $10,000 prize is awarded to “a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”
Saunders is the author of more than a dozen books and is the rare short story writer who has earned the adjective “bestselling,” notably for the collection “Tenth of December,” a National Book Award finalist in 2013. He has also become a genre unto himself — his name synonymous with twisted humor; poignant, unpredictable narratives and acute social commentary. Ruth Dickey, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement that Saunders had forged an “extraordinary” legacy.
“Through immersive world-building, deeply human characters, and compassionate curiosity towards the most pressing sociopolitical issues of our time, George Saunders’ writing exemplifies the power of fiction to unite us despite — and perhaps because of — our fractured and complex world,” Dickey said.
Youngest recipient since 2004
At age 66, he is the youngest recipient since Judy Blume in 2004 and his mindset is more in line with a mid-career author in transition than an eminence looking back. While he established his name as a short story writer, he more recently began forging a career as a novelist. His first published novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” is a surreal, polyphonic meditation on the late president that won the Booker Prize in 2017, a rare honor for an American author. Early next year, he will publish “Vigil,” in which an oil company CEO confronts his final moments on Earth.
“A tank. His wife had once called him that,” Saunders writes in his new novel. “He rolled right over what life had put in front of him. He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as a high guy could go. If he did say so himself.”
New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman will present Saunders his medal during a Nov. 19 ceremony in Manhattan, when winners in five competitive categories will be announced and author-editor-publisher Roxane Gay will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Treisman and Saunders have worked together for decades, in what Treisman described in a recent email as “a truly intuitive and ego-less collaboration.”
“I think the uniqueness of George’s work comes from his ability to combine humor, sometimes quite pointed and dark humor, with a deep-seated faith in humanity,” she wrote. “His work can be satirical without being mean; hilarious but also heartbreaking. It’s hard to say what American letters would be like without him because he’s such a one-off. If he didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have known or imagined what we were missing!”
Teacher sparks thoughts of becoming a writer
With influences ranging from Chekhov to Groucho Marx, Saunders describes his background as “off-kilter.” Born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958 and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois, he doesn’t remember himself as a prolific reader in childhood and didn’t attend a liberal arts college; he majored in geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
But even in high school, thanks in part to a “wonderful” American literature teacher, he was thinking of becoming a writer, whether or not he wanted a degree to go with it. Saunders read for pleasure in college and beyond, supporting himself as a door attendant, a roofer and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller among other jobs. In 1988, he received an MFA from the creative writing program at Syracuse University, where he met his future wife, Paula Redick, a fellow student at the time. He has been on the Syracuse faculty since 1997.
Once he had tapped into his inner laughter, his work soon caught on. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” was a PEN/Hemingway finalist for best debut fiction and four of his stories won National Magazine Awards. In her statement Friday, Dickey also noted Saunders’ “genuine enthusiasm” for the process of writing, citing his book on the pleasures of studying Russian literature, “A Swim In a Pond in the Rain,” and his Substack Story Club.
He is, at least, unofficially, a “genius,” a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Saunders is also, unofficially, a proponent of something not known to align with genius — being a nice person. In 2013, he gave a widely shared convocation address at Syracuse, urging the audience to try and be kinder, to “err in the direction of kindness.” Books may be a solitary pastime, but he also believes they can guide us as social beings.
“I never understood literature as anything but that thing to help us live better, something that allows me to cut to the chase,” he told the AP. “Communication and kindness — this radical idea that other people are as real as we are.”