George Saunders (born
December 2,
1958) is an
American writer of short stories and essays. His writing has appeared in
The New Yorker,
Harper's,
McSweeney's and
GQ, among others. He also contributes a weekly column,
American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of
The Guardian's Saturday edition. Currently a professor at
Syracuse University, he won the
National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the
O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection,
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a finalist for the 1996
PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received one of that year's
MacArthur Fellowships, more popularly known as the "genius grant." His story collection
In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The
Story Prize in 2007.
Biography
Saunders was born in
Amarillo, Texas and raised on the south side of
Chicago. He is a graduate of
Oak Forest High School located in
Oak Forest, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. In
1981, he received a
B.S. in geophysical engineering from
Colorado School of Mines in
Golden, Colorado. Speaking of his scientific background, Saunders said "...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." In 1988, he obtained an
M.A. in creative writing from
Syracuse University. As a young man in the 1980s, Saunders considered himself an
Objectivist, but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to
neoconservative thinking. From 1989 to 1996 he worked for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in
Rochester, New York as a technical writer and geophysical engineer. He also worked for a time in
Sumatra with an oil exploration crew. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of
Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's
MFA program. In
2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly called a "genius grant". In the same year he was also awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders currently resides in Syracuse, New York. He is married and has two daughters. His most recent book, a collection of recent non-fiction entitled
The Braindead Megaphone, was published on
September 4,
2007.
Themes in Saunders' writing
Saunders' fiction often focuses on the absurdity of
consumerism and
corporate culture. While many reviewers are quick to mention the
satirical tone in most of Saunders' writing, many of these same works also deal with philosophical questions of
morality. The tragicomic element, concurrently devastating and wildly funny, has earned Saunders comparisons to
Kurt Vonnegut, a writer to whom Saunders has acknowledged a debt.
Film adaptations
The film rights to
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by
Ben Stiller in the late 1990s and a film has been rumored to be in the works for several years now, to be produced by Stiller's company,
Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay for one of his stories from
Pastoralia, "Sea Oak."
Books
Fiction
- Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
- In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)
Non-fiction
- A Bee Stung Me, So I Killed the Fish (2006) (promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies)
- The Braindead Megaphone (2007) (collected essays)
