Author profile

George Saunders

American author of darkly comic, compassionate fiction, best known for his short stories and the Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

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About George Saunders

George Saunders is an American writer and professor whose career took an unusual route through geophysical engineering and technical writing. He studied at the Colorado School of Mines and Syracuse University, where he later joined the creative writing faculty. He is especially known as a short-story writer, though his work also includes novels, essays, novellas and books for younger readers.

Saunders often places vulnerable people inside absurd systems: degrading workplaces, commercial spectacles and slightly futuristic versions of American life. Satire and surreal invention drive the plots, but sympathy for compromised, frightened characters gives the stories their force. Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December show that combination at its sharpest.

His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Set largely in a Georgetown cemetery after the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, it unfolds through a chorus of living and dead voices. Tenth of December was a National Book Award finalist, and Saunders received the 2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction as well as a MacArthur Fellowship.

Start with Lincoln in the Bardo. Its fractured, theatrical form can initially seem strange, but the story of a grieving father soon supplies a clear emotional center. It is the fullest introduction to Saunders’s humor, formal daring and attention to people caught between selfishness and grace.

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Lincoln in the Bardo

In February 1862, as the American Civil War enters a worsening phase, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln dies of illness and is placed in a Georgetown cemetery. George Saunders builds his novel around the grief of Willie’s father, President Abraham Lincoln, and the voices of spirits who linger among the graves, unable or unwilling to accept their deaths. During one night, the child’s confusion, the president’s mourning, and the ghosts’ unfinished attachments converge. The story moves between supernatural testimony and documentary-looking fragments about the Lincolns, the war, and the night of Willie’s burial. Its unusual chorus turns private bereavement into a larger meditation on attachment, denial, compassion, and collective loss. Both historical and deliberately invented, the novel asks how people release what they love—and how sorrow might deepen a person’s sense of responsibility toward strangers.

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