Amor Towles at a Glance

Full Name: Amor Towles

How to Pronounce: AAY-mor TOHLS

Born: 1964

Nationality: United States

Education:

• Yale University (BA)
• Stanford University (MA)

Genres:

• Contemporary fiction

Biography & Background

Amor Towles Biography

Amor Towles is an American novelist whose work often centers themes of class, ambition, and social change. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Towles worked as an investment banker in New York before beginning his career as a novelist. After graduating with a BA from Yale University, Towles completed an MA at Stanford University. He worked as an investment manager and researcher at New York’s Select Equity Group shortly after graduation up until his first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), became an unexpected success. Towles cites novelist and Paris Review cofounder Peter Matthiessen as an inspiration for his writing career.

Since Rules of Civility, he has published two more novels—A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and The Lincoln Highway (2021)—as well as a short story collection titled Table for Two (2024). Though the books vary in setting from New York in the Great Depression to Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution to the prairies of the American Midwest, each explores a pivotal historical moment through the struggles and ambitions of its central characters.