![]() ![]() Towles started writing in first grade, and years later at a Yale seminar was taken aside by Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, who saw a talent the two made a pact to cultivate. “My great-grandparents,” he allows, “would have been very comfortable in Edith Wharton’s novels.” The upbringing outside Boston that he calls “middle class” involved private school, then Yale and Stanford. ![]() In many ways, Towles writes what he knows. “When someone slams the cup down, it’s got to sound like china hitting the table.” “If it’s a Chekhov play, and they are sitting around the table, and there’s tea on the table, that stuff can’t feel fake,” he says. ![]() The foreground, on the other hand, must be as concrete as the artifacts that bridge the worlds he creates. The author may set his stories in a specific past, but he regards history as only suggestive, like the backdrop in an opera. ![]()
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