Philipp Meyer Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Philipp Meyer is an award-winning literary fiction author from the United States that is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

The author was born in New York City in 1974 where his parents lived until he was five years old. They would then live in Baltimore’s Hamden suburb, a crime-filled suburb that was suffering from economic collapse following World War II.

According to Meyer, it was rough but not the place where you were very likely to get jumped even though shootings were relatively rare.

He was brought up by artsy, intellectual people that did not care for money. His father then worked as a photographer and sculptor while his mother was a painter.

Nonetheless, he had a very happy childhood where he was very protected. He still remembers listening to classical music and reading all manner of books from the huge bookshelf her parents had.

He was a voracious reader and was often reading works that were meant for people ten years his senior. For instance, he read “Crime and Punishment” even before he was ten and asserted that he understood very little of it then.

While he loved reading, he was a terrible student who failed at most subjects as he found them boring. He would eventually drop out at 16, so that he could pursue things he was more interested in.

After dropping out of school, Philipp Meyer spent several years working as a bike mechanic, since he had always been interested in mechanical things.

He would then enroll at a Jesuit college after which he studied English at Cornell University after several rejections from a ton of Ivy League schools. Cornell changed his life as he loved the fact that he was responsible for himself.

Meyer finally had the chance of proving to people that a kid from Hamden could make it despite the stigma and judgment. He used his fury as fuel for the fire in him and worked harder as his parents had often instilled in him a sense of work ethic.

He was always optimistic that he would one day become a successful person even though that happened in a very cliche way.

The light switch came on while he was taking a composition class in his freshman year. Out of nowhere, he started believing that he was a writer.

As a twenty-one-year-old, he began writing short stories, and soon after he penned a self-indulgent manuscript that was 600 pages long.

He would soon began making each word intentional as he took into account his readers while writing his works.

Following his graduation from Cornell, Philipp Meyer was a derivatives trader in New York City as he sought to pay off his loans. He was at that time obsessed with not being poor and giving his kids the best he could.

It took him several years to realize that money was not that important. What he really loved was the intelligence of his colleagues, the pressure, and the adrenaline rush.

It was then that he started writing his novels at night, on the weekends, and on the subway. It was when he started pretending to be sick to write his novels from home that he knew he had to quit.

Things did not go so well as he got tons of rejections from agents all across the US, even as almost all the graduate school writing programs deemed him not good enough.

Back home and living in his parents’ basement, he worked as an ambulance driver and construction worker among other blue-collar jobs. It would take eight years but he had a belief in himself and persevered.

Ultimately, he managed to sell several short stories and the Austin-based Michener Center for Writers accepted him into their MFA program. He published “American Rust” his debut novel in 2015.

Philipp Meyer’s novel “American Rust” is set in an economically devastated but beautiful steel town in Pennsylvania.

It tells a story of the desperation and the lost American dream in addition to acts of love, loyalty, and friendship that may arise from its loss.

From prisons to train yards to local bars, it tells the story of two lads bound to their hometown by inertia, responsibility, family, and the beauty of the town. Still, they always dream of a future beyond abandoned homes and factories.

When he is left all alone to care for his elderly father following the suicide of his mother, Isaac English is longing to live a better life far away from home.

Finally, he sets out to leave accompanied by his best friend and soon they get involved in an act of violence that is sure to change their lives forever.

The work evokes the many works of John Steinbeck which chronicled the events of the Great Depression.

The novel explores the lives of Americans that lived in the modern contemporary heartland at a moment of profound uncertainty and unrest.

It is a lucid but dark vision that explores the dark realities that fight against our desire for transcendence and the power of friendship and love to redeem us.

“The Son” by Philipp Meyer is a work set in 1849 during the spring. Eli McCullough is a thirteen-year-old that is the firstborn child in a family that recently moved to the newly established state of Texas.

Things get interesting when a bunch of Comanche warriors storm their home and take him captive after brutally killing his sister and mother.

Clever and brave, Eli soon ingrains himself into the Comanche, as he learns their language and ways and embraces his new name, even as he takes up his place as one of the chief’s sons.

He fights the chief’s enemies including many white settlers, which complicates his understanding of his identity and loyalty.

But when starvation, disease, and a huge army of settlers decimate the tribe he finds himself in the familiar position of being all alone.

Neither Indian nor white man, fully wild nor civilized, he will have to find a place for himself in a world where he does not know if he will ever belong.

Intertwined with his story of luck, adventure, grit, tragedy, and hardship is the story of Peter his son. The latter has to bear the huge price of his father’s drive for power.

Phillipp Meyer makes an exploration of how Ele’s steely pragmatism and ruthlessness have a huge impact on several generations of his progeny.