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Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale and received an MA in English from Stanford. Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his family. His novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway, and his collection of shorter fiction Table for Two have all been New York Times bestsellers, have collectively sold more than eight million copies, and have been translated into more than forty languages. Both Bill Gates and President Barack Obama included A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway on their annual book recommendation lists.
Rules of Civility (2011) was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of the year. The book’s French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald.
A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. In 2024, Paramount+ released a mini series based on the novel which stars Ewan McGregor.
The Lincoln Highway (2021) debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is being adapted as a feature film by Warner Brothers with Chris Storer, the creator of “The Bear”, writing and directing.
Table for Two (2024), a collection of six short stories and the novella “Eve in Hollywood”, was a New York Times bestseller.
Towles’s short stories have appeared in the Paris Review (#112), Granta (#148), British Vogue, and Audible Originals.
Towles wrote the introduction to Scribner’s 75th anniversary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night , the Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the Vintage Crime edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.
Towles served as the selecting editor of the 2024 O. Henry Prize, choosing the year’s twenty best short stories. His essay on short fiction is included in the collection of the twenty winners: The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners.
“As for Clothing”, Towles’s essay on Walden, appears in the anthology Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau.
Access to a few of his essays can be found in the Other Writing section of this website.
Author photo taken by Dmitri Kasterine in Garrison, NY.