Why did you decide to write a book from the perspective of a young woman? Rather, I tried to rely on my secondhand familiarity with the period to orient my imagination. So I really didn't do any applied research for the book. Over the years, I listened to the music, saw the movies, read the novels and manifestos, lingered in front of the paintings. Then in the span of a few decades you have James Joyce, Cubism, Surrealism, jazz, Nijinsky, Henry Ford, the skyscraper, Sigmund Freud, the Russian Revolution, movies, airplanes, and the general upending of received forms in almost every area of human endeavor. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace. In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. I've always had a great interest in the period between 19-because it was a time of such incredible creative combustion. Why did you decide to write a book set in the late 1930s, and how did you research the period? He is a principal at an investment firm in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. If my schedule allows, I will try to stop by.Īmor Towles was born and raised just outside Boston, Massachusetts. And if your reading group is meeting for dinner in New York somewhere between Canal and 34th streets, please let me know. You may also submit your thoughts or questions there. If you are interested, there is additional content regarding Rules of Civility at including brief essays on Walker Evans and jazz, a 1930s time capsule, etcetera. What follows are some questions for discussion that might have surfaced in my reading group. So, if you've come this far, I owe you my heartfelt thanks. Meeting once a month, we started with Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and have since worked through the works of Twain and Faulkner, Cervantes and García Marquez, Tolstoy and Nabokov-dwelling over dinner on our favorite passages, on themes and ambiguities, sharing our perspectives.Īs someone who has written quietly for twenty years, the notion that a group might gather to discuss a book of mine seems something so fantastic it must be a mirage. Five years ago, three friends and I set out to read some of the "great books"-or those works of literature that would merit rereading several times over the course of our lives.
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