Rules of Civility

July 2021 marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of Rules of Civility. As a novel about a twenty-five-year-old woman from a working class background who’s setting out to climb the socio-economic ladder of New York in 1938 – Amor Towles

First of all, if you have come to this Reader’s Guide because you have read A Gentleman in Moscow, I owe you my heartfelt thanks. I hope you enjoyed the book. For those interested in learning more about the background of the book or my process, I encourage you to browse this site where I have placed a variety of supporting materials. In particular, you may be interested in my Q&A (which answers some frequently asked questions) or my brief history of the Metropol Hotel.

In his remarkable first novel, the best-selling Rules of Civility, Towles etched 1930s New York in crystalline relief. Though set a world away in Moscow over the course of three decades, his latest polished literary foray into a bygone era is just as impressive… —Booklist.

Passages from various books in my library that were published in the 1930s.

“This very good first novel about striving and surviving in Depression-era Manhattan deserves attention…The great strength of Rules of Civility is in the sharp, sure-handed…evocation of Manhattan in the late ‘30s…  Advance reviews of Mr. Towles’s novel have rarely failed to bring up F. Scott’s name. Who needs such burdensome comparisons? On the evidence of “Rules of…

United Kingdom Sceptre July 2011 Germany Graf Verlag March 2011 France Albin Michel 2012 Italy Neri Pozza October 2011 Spain Salamandra 2012 Netherlands Orlando January 2012 Sweden Bokforlaget Forum August 2011 Finland WSOY Fall 2012 Norway August 2012 Israel Modan Fall 2012 China Shanghai 99 July 2012

Five years ago, three friends and I set out to read some of the “great books” – or those works of literature which would merit re-reading several times over the course of our lives. We started with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and have since worked through the works of Twain and Faulkner, Cervantes and Marquez,…

Below are some answers to commonly asked questions about RULES OF CIVILITY. If you’re interested in seeing one of my original presentations on the book you can find the speech here and the Q&A here. Commentary on the role of Walker Evans’s photography in the book is included here. Commentary on the role of jazz…

I have created an extensive playlist of music from roughly 1935-1945 that spans this transition. While jazz is not central to the narrative of Rules of Civility, the music and its various formulations are an important component of the book’s backdrop.

While I began writing Rules of Civility in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s when I happened upon a copy of Many Are Called, the collection of portraits that Walker Evan took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.