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Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year-old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.
The story opens on New Year’s Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne’er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.
(Summary provided by the author)
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 called Table for Two have collectively sold more than eight million copies and 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.
(Biography provided by the author)
