American Rust (Meyer) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—near Ithaca, New York; Austin, Texas


Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, born in 1974, and is the author of the novel American Rust, as well as short stories published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and Esquire UK. He grew up in Hampden, a blue-collar Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood often featured in the films of John Waters. His mother is an artist; his father is an electrician turned college biology instructor.

Meyer attended Baltimore city public schools, including Baltimore City College High School, until dropping out at age 16 and getting a GED. He spent the next five years working as a bicycle mechanic and occasionally volunteering at Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center.

At age 20, while taking college classes in Baltimore, Meyer decided to become a writer. He also decided to leave his hometown and at 22, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University. Meyer graduated Cornell with a degree in English but then took a job on Wall Street to pay off his student loans.

With the Swiss investment bank UBS, Meyer trained in London and Zurich and was given a position as a derivatives trader. After several years at UBS, he had written most of a novel (no relation to American Rust) and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. When attempts at publishing that novel failed, a book he has called “an apprentice-level work,” Meyer took jobs as an emergency medical technician and construc-tion worker. He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.

Not long after arriving in Austin, Meyer drove to New Orleans to do relief work during Hurricane Katrina. He arrived in the middle of the hurricane and spent several days doing emergency medical work for a local police department.

American Rust was an Economist Book of the Year in 2009, a Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009, a New York Times Notable Book of 2009, a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009, and an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009. Reviewers in the London Telegraph, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel."

The book is a third person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. While a reviewer in The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the work of Faulkner, various other reviewers, including Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, and Taylor Antrim writing in the Daily Beast, have favorably compared Meyer to a wide variety of more traditional writers, including Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Dennis Lehane.

The Son, published in 2013, has been hailed a classic, even the "Great American Novel," by reviewers. It is a saga of the Texas Mccullough family—"the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development." (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

Meyer currently lives in rural areas outside Ithaca, New York, and Austin, Texas. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)