Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer (born May 3, 1974) is an American fiction writer and the author of the novels American Rust and The Son, as well as short stories published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Meyer also created and produced the AMC television show based on his novel. He won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, received a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He won the 2014 Lucien Barrière prize in France and the 2015 Prix Littérature-Monde Prize in France. In 2017 he was named a Chevalier (Knight) in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Meyer considers his literary influences to be "the modernists, basically Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway, Welty, etc." Outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and the Telegraph have compared his writing to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and J. D. Salinger.

Education Meyer grew up in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Hampden is a working-class neighborhood mostly known as the setting for many of John Waters's films. Meyer attended the Baltimore City Public Schools system, including Baltimore City College High School, until dropping out at age 16 and getting a GED. He spent the next five years working as a bicycle mechanic and occasionally volunteering at Baltimore's Shock Trauma Center.

At age 19, while taking college classes in Baltimore, Meyer decided to become a writer. He also decided to leave Baltimore and at 21, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University. Meyer loved Cornell, feeling that “All of the sudden I wasn’t alone." During his time there, he wrote a 600-page novel that was never published, later calling it "self-indulgent undergrad nonsense". Meyer graduated with a degree in English and many years later received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

Career Meyer worked as a first responder for about 15 years, mostly part-time. In his early twenties he volunteered as an orderly at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in downtown Baltimore. He served as a volunteer firefighter at fire departments in Maryland and upstate New York. He was one of the first outside EMTs to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, driving his own vehicle to New Orleans and arriving on the day of the storm.

Meyer also spent a few years working on Wall Street. After graduating from college, he took a job with the Swiss investment bank UBS as a derivatives trader. He has called his experience there "soul-crushing" His second novel, The Son, was published in 2013.

After the publication of The Son, Meyer decided to explore work in Hollywood as a sideline to writing books. He developed The Son as a television show and co-founded a production company (which was dissolved after a few years). In a 2023 interview with Ryan Holiday, Meyer said he found it almost impossible to balance working in television with writing books and that he had returned to writing books. He said he had spent most of the previous decade working on his third novel, The City.

AMC adapted The Son as a television series that ran for several seasons. Showtime and Amazon adapted American Rust into a television show. The second season premiered in 2024.

American Rust Most of American Rust was written during Meyer's time at the Michener Center (2005–2008). In December 2007 the novel was acquired by Spiegel & Grau, a Random House imprint. American Rust was eventually acquired by publishers in 23 countries and translated into 17 languages. It is a third-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman.

American Rust was a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2009). Reviewers in the UK's The Daily Telegraph, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel".

The Son While finishing American Rust, Meyer sought another subject through which he could explore what he felt was the "creation myth of America".

Meyer's original vision for The Son was quite different from the final novel; it originally featured "six or seven characters”, was "set in the present day", and "was conceived [...] as a book about the rise of a family dynasty and America’s relationship with war and violence." He saw the potential for a novel about the Bandit Wars and the "creation myth of Texas"

The Son was published in May 2013. It was described in press releases as "an epic of Texas", with a plot about "three generations of a Texas family: Eli, his son Pete and Pete’s daughter Jeanne. Each face their own challenges—Comanche raiders, border wars and a changing civilization, respectively." Meyer called the work-in-progress a "partly historical novel about the rise of an oil and ranching dynasty in Texas, tracing the family from the earliest days of white settlement, fifty years of open warfare with the Comanche, the end of the frontier and the rise of the cattle industry, and transitioning into the modern (oil) age. The rise of Texas as a power pretty closely parallels America's rise to global power, for obvious reasons. And I wanted to write about the parts of America that are growing, rather than declining."

Meyer has said that he has conceived The Son as the second part of a trilogy of novels that began with American Rust. and won the Lucien Barrière Prize and the Prix Littérature-Monde in France. It was also long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award.

The City Meyer's third novel will be published in 2026, according to sources online. Meyer has described The City as his longest and most ambitious book, which took nearly ten years to write.

Meyer intended The City to be a modern take on Dante's Divine Comedy, with elements of magical realism, dystopian fiction, and science fiction. It takes place at the end of the world. Like his other novels, it has multiple points of view, interlocking stories, and stories within stories.