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| "You say it's your birthday!" |
It's the birthday of short-story writer George Saunders, born in Amarillo, Texas (1958). He grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and he loved books about World War II and baseball. In high school, he discovered Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and books by Ayn Rand and Khalil Gibran, and they changed his life. He said: "It definitely went directly from the page into my heart. I think I was a really good reader in the sense that I was a desperate reader, desperate to find out what was good, what was true, how a person should live."
He was particularly influenced by Ayn Rand; he started thinking of himself as a character from an Ayn Rand novel. He said: "I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. And I don't want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches." So he went to the Colorado School of Mines to study engineering, then worked various odd jobs, and finally decided to apply to the Syracuse Creative Writing Program. There were two professors who wanted to let him in, even though everyone else objected — most of the other students were stars from Ivy League schools — so he was let in as a "grand experiment." He said: "I felt more like a 'clerical error.' [...] While the other students knew all about Shelley and Keats, I knew about Alfred Wegener, the father of plate tectonics, whom we affectionately used to call 'Big Al.' But fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically, and so I had a feeling there was room for me."
His books include CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December: Stories.
Saunders said: "Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to."
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