Richard Powers

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Richard Powers

Born June 18, 1957 (1957-06-18) (age 50)
Evanston, Illinois
Occupation Novelist
Nationality United States
Genres Literary fiction
For other persons named Richard Powers, see Richard Powers (disambiguation).

Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.

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[edit] Life and work

Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and his family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood, where his father was the principal at a local school. When Powers was 11, his family moved again, this time to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok. In his time outside the United States, Powers developed a love of music, with notable skill in vocal music as well as proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying classics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, but primarily works of non-fiction.

At age 16, Powers moved back to the U.S., and following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his first semester, however, he switched his major to English literature, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1978. He continued his education at Illinois, and in 1980 received his MA in literature. He decided not to pursue a PhD in the field because of (a) his aversion to strict specialization, which was also one of the reasons for his earlier transfer from physics to English, and (b) the apparent absence of pleasure in the reading and writing that graduate students and their professors do (see his novel Galatea 2.2).

After receiving his master's degree, he worked in Boston, Massachusetts, as a computer programmer until an encounter with the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander, at the Museum of Fine Arts, inspired him to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985. The novel contains three alternating threads. The first is a fictional story about the three young men in the picture during World War I. The second is about Peter Mays, an editor for a technology magazine, who is obsessed with the photograph. The third is the author's own critical and historical musings, mostly concerned with the mechanics of photography and the life of Henry Ford.

Powers then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, a work that juxtaposes Disney and nuclear warfare, and then his best-known work to date, The Gold Bug Variations, a story that ties together genetics, music, and computer science. Powers has said that he moved to the Netherlands to avoid the publicity and attention generated by his first novel. When asked about his reclusive tendencies, he responded, "All that sort of thing [author publicity] just creates confusion about the nature of the book, deflects attention from what you've done. That's what always seems to happen in this culture; you grab hold of a personality and ignore the work."[cite this quote]

Operation Wandering Soul, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1993,[1] is about a young doctor dealing with the ugly realities of a pediatrics ward. It was mostly written during a year's stay at the University of Cambridge, and completed when Powers returned to the University of Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence.

Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a Pygmalion story, about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry.

Gain (1998) is a look at the history of a 150-year-old chemical company, interwoven with the story of a woman living near one of its plants and succumbing to ovarian cancer.

Plowing the Dark (2000) is another novel with parallel narratives, this time of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality, while at the same time an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut.

The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a story about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's legendary concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Powers displays his knowledge of music and physics in this exploration of race relations and the burdens of talent.

Powers's latest novel, The Echo Maker (2006), won a National Book Award[1] and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] The novel tells the story of a young man whose brain is injured in a truck accident. Although he largely recovers, he is left with some peculiar cognitive impairments, including capgras syndrome, the suspicion that his sister has been replaced by an impostor. Another important character is a consulting neurologist modeled on Oliver Sacks. The novel explores the themes of cognitive construction of reality, and the relationships between memory and emotional bonds between people, and some of the tensions between the beneficial and exploitative aspects of a famous doctor's work. The events occur along the Platte River in Nebraska, near the shrinking migratory refuge of the unique sandhill cranes, and are influenced by the increasing social frictions arising out of water and land use disputes.

He was a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. He currently teaches a graduate course in multimedia authoring, as well as an undergraduate course on the mechanics of narrative, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is the Swanlund Professor of English.

[edit] Critical response

Reviewer William Deresiewicz has written critically of Powers's oeuvre; in his review of The Echo Maker, published in The Nation, he writes of The Gold Bug Variations that "what's missing from the novel is, well, a novel. The characters are idealized, the love stories mawkish and clichéd, the emotions meant to ground the scientific speculations in lived experience announced rather than established. The thinnest of devices are introduced to allow Powers to suspend the plot for dozens of pages at a stretch." But Deresiewicz also noted that his "is hardly the standard view of Powers's work. Over the past two decades, Powers has established himself as one of our most praised as well as one of our most prolific writers of fiction." [3]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Awards and recognition

  • 1985 Rosenthal Award of American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
  • 1985 PEN/Hemingway Special Citation
  • 1989 MacArthur Fellowship
  • 1991 Time Magazine Book of the Year
  • 1993 Finalist, National Book Award
  • 1996 Swanlund Professorship, University of Illinois
  • 1998 Business Week Best Business Books of 1998
  • 1998 Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1999 James Fenimore Cooper Prize, American Society of Historians
  • 1999 Lannan Literary Award
  • 2000 Vursell Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
  • 2000 Elected Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois
  • 2001 Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, Centenary College
  • 2001 Author of the Year, Illinois Association of Teachers of English
  • 2003 Pushcart Prize
  • 2003 Dos Passos Prize For Literature, Longwood University
  • 2003 W. H. Smith Literary Award (Great Britain)
  • 2004 Ambassador Book Award
  • 2006 National Book Award for Fiction
  • New York Times Notable Book, 2003, 2000, 1998, 1995, 1991
  • Best Books of 2003: Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, London Evening Standard, Time Out ( London), San Jose Mercury News
  • Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, 2003, 1995, 1991, 1985
  • Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2006

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Andrea Lynn. "A Powers-ful Presence", LASNews Magazine, University of Illinois, November 2006. Retrieved on 2006-11-29. 
  2. ^ "The Pulitzer Prizes: Nominated Finalists 2007". The Pulitzer Prizes at pulitzer.org (April 16, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
  3. ^ "Science Fiction" by William Deresiewicz. The Nation (September 20, 2006 online, October 9, 2006 in print). Retrieved on 2007-07-18.

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Powers, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Novelist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Evanston, Illinois
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH