George Saunders
George Saunders is an American writer. He is best known for his short stories and his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. Saunders' short stories have been published as several collections, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December: Stories.
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 and won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm".
His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Tenth of December: Stories won The Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural Folio Prize.
Early life and education
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago, attended St. Damian Catholic School and graduated from Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois. He spent some of his early twenties working as a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller. In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Of his scientific background, Saunders has 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 was awarded an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he worked with Tobias Wolff. At Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, a fellow writer, whom he married. Saunders recalled, "we engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands".
Of his influences, Saunders has written:
Career
From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s.Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program in addition to writing fiction and nonfiction. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope College's Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007.
Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media. While multiple reviewers have noted his writing's satirical tone, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work has inspired him.
Ben Stiller bought the film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in the late 1990s; as of 2007, the project was in development by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on his short story "Sea Oak".
He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian
Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but now views the philosophy unfavorably, likening it to neoconservatism. He is a student of Nyingma Buddhism.
Awards and honors
Honors
In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation.In 2006, Saunders was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also that year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2013, Time magazine named Saunders one of their 100 most influential people. The author Mary Karr wrote for Time that "or more than a decade, George Saunders has been the best short-story writer in English". In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Awards
Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times: in 1994, for "The 400-Pound CEO" ; in 1996, for "Bounty" ; in 2000, for "The Barber's Unhappiness" ; and in 2004, for "The Red Bow". Saunders won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Falls", initially published in the January 22, 1996, issue of The New Yorker.In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. His short-story collection Tenth of December was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2013" by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. In a January 2013 cover story, The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year". One of the stories in the collection, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.
In 2017, Saunders published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize and was a New York Times bestseller.
In 2025, the National Book Foundation presented its 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Saunders at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 19, 2025.
Other honors
- Lannan Foundation – Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001
- MacArthur Fellowship, 2006
- Guggenheim Fellowship, 2006
- American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy Award, 2009
- PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 2013The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2013", Tenth of December: Stories
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elected as Member, 2014
- American Academy of Arts and Letters, Inducted as Member, 2018
- The House of Culture (Stockholm) International Literary Prize, 2018
Selected works
Story collections
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline Pastoralia In Persuasion Nation Fox 8 Tenth of December: StoriesNovels
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil Lincoln in the Bardo- ''Vigil''
Nonfiction
*Children's books
Essays and reporting
*Anthologies
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer Cappelens Forslags Conversational Lexicon Volume II, edited by Pil Cappelen Smith, published by Cappelens Forslag ISBN 978-82-999643-4-0Interviews
- "". New York Times Magazine, November 2015.
- "". Image Journal, 2016.
- "". The Paris Review, issue 231.
- "". Believer Magazine, January 2021.
- "" Mayday, March 2021.
Stories
| Title | Publication | Collected in |
| "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room" | Northwest Review 24.2 | - |
| "In the Park, Higher than the Town" | Puerto del Sol 22.2 | - |
| "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror" | Quarterly West 34 | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" | The Kenyon Review 14.4 | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" | The New Yorker | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "The 400-Pound CEO" | Harper's | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "The Wavemaker Falters" | Witness 7.2 | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "Sticks" | Story | Tenth of December |
| "Isabelle" | Indiana Review | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "Bounty" | Harper's | CivilWarLand in Bad Decline |
| "The Falls" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "Winky" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "The Deacon" | The New Yorker | - |
| "The End of FIRPO in the World" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "Sea Oak" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "I Can Speak!"™ | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "The Barber's Unhappiness" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "Exhortation" aka "Four Institutional Monologues I" | McSweeney's 4 | Tenth of December |
| "93990" aka "Four Institutional Monologues IV" | McSweeney's 4 | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Pastoralia" | The New Yorker | Pastoralia |
| "My Flamboyant Grandson" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Jon" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "The Red Bow" | Esquire | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Christmas" aka "Chicago Christmas, 1984" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Bohemians" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "My Amendment" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Adams" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Brad Carrigan, American" | Harper's | In Persuasion Nation |
| "CommComm" | The New Yorker | In Persuasion Nation |
| "In Persuasion Nation" | Harper's | In Persuasion Nation |
| "Puppy" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "Al Roosten" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "Victory Lap" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "Fox 8" | McSweeney's "San Francisco Panorama" | Fox 8 |
| "Escape from Spiderhead" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "Home" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "My Chivalric Fiasco" | Harper's | Tenth of December |
| "Tenth of December" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "The Semplica Girl Diaries" | The New Yorker | Tenth of December |
| "Mother's Day" | The New Yorker | Liberation Day |
| "Elliott Spencer" | The New Yorker | Liberation Day |
| "Love Letter" | The New Yorker | Liberation Day |
| "Ghoul" | The New Yorker | Liberation Day |
| "The Mom of Bold Action" | The New Yorker | Liberation Day |
| "Liberation Day" | Liberation Day | Liberation Day |
| "A Thing at Work" | Liberation Day | Liberation Day |
| "Sparrow" | Liberation Day | Liberation Day |
| "My House" | Liberation Day | Liberation Day |
| "Thursday" | The New Yorker | - |
| "The Third Premier" | The New Yorker | - |
| "The Moron Factory" | The Atlantic | - |