George Saunders

For other people named George Saunders, see George Saunders (disambiguation).

George Saunders
Born	December 2, 1958 (1958-12-02) Amarillo, Texas
Occupation	Short story writer, Journalist, College Professor
Nationality	United States
Influences Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon
www.saunderssaunderssaunders.com

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ, among other publications. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian’s Saturday edition until October, 2008. A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders 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 a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007.

Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up on the south side of Chicago. He is a graduate of Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. In 1981 Saunders 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.

Career as author

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties 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 Fellowship. In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders resides in Syracuse, New York, is married and has two daughters. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope's Visiting Writers Series. His most recent book, a collection of recent nonfiction titled The Braindead Megaphone, was published on September 4, 2007. While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and Late Night with David Letterman.

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism and corporate culture and the role of the mass media. While many reviewers mention the satirical tone in most of Saunders's writing, it also raises moral questions. The tragicomic element in his work has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, a writer to whom Saunders has acknowledged a debt.

The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller in the late 1990s and the project remains in development by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on one of his stories, "Sea Oak".

Books

Fiction

• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) (short stories and a novella)
• Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
• The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) (novella with illustrations by Lane Smith) (New York Times bestseller)
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) (novella)
• In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)

Nonfiction

• A Bee Stung Me, So I Killed All the Fish (Notes from the Homeland 2003–2006) (2006) (promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies to accompany the book In Persuasion Nation)
• The Braindead Megaphone (2007) (collected essays)