Richard Powers

Author profile

born

June 18, 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, The United States

gender

male

website

http://www.richardpowers.net/

genre

Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.

Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and his family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood, where his father was the principal at a local school. When Powers was 11, his family moved again, this time to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok and where he attended until the end of his Freshman year, 1972. In his time outside the United States, Powers developed a love of music, with notable skill in vocal music as well as proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying classics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, but primar...moreRichard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.

Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and his family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood, where his father was the principal at a local school. When Powers was 11, his family moved again, this time to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok and where he attended until the end of his Freshman year, 1972. In his time outside the United States, Powers developed a love of music, with notable skill in vocal music as well as proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying classics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, but primarily works of non-fiction.

At age 16, Powers moved back to the U.S., and following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his first semester, however, he switched his major to English literature, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1978. He continued his education at Illinois, and in 1980 received his MA in literature. He decided not to pursue a PhD in the field because of (a) his aversion to strict specialization, which was also one of the reasons for his earlier transfer from physics to English, and (b) the apparent absence of pleasure in the reading and writing that graduate students and their professors do (see his novel Galatea 2.2).

After receiving his master's degree, he worked in Boston, Massachusetts, as a computer programmer until an encounter with the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander, at the Museum of Fine Arts, inspired him to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985. The novel contains three alternating threads. The first is a fictional story about the three young men in the picture during World War I. The second is about Peter Mays, an editor for a technology magazine, who is obsessed with the photograph. The third is the author's own critical and historical musings, mostly concerned with the mechanics of photography and the life of Henry Ford.

Powers then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, a work that juxtaposes Disney and nuclear warfare, and then his best-known work to date, The Gold Bug Variations, a story that ties together genetics, music, and computer science. Powers has said that he moved to the Netherlands to avoid the publicity and attention generated by his first novel. When asked about his reclusive tendencies, he responded, "All that sort of thing [author publicity] just creates confusion about the nature of the book, deflects attention from what you've done. That's what always seems to happen in this culture; you grab hold of a personality and ignore the work."[cite this quote]

Operation Wandering Soul, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1993,[1] is about a young doctor dealing with the ugly realities of a pediatrics ward. It was mostly written during a year's stay at the University of Cambridge, and completed when Powers returned to the University of Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence.

Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a Pygmalion story, about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry.

Gain (1998) is a look at the history of a 150-year-old chemical company, interwoven with the story of a woman living near one of its plants and succumbing to ovarian cancer. It won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1999.

Plowing the Dark (2000) is another novel with parallel narratives, this time of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality, while at the same time an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut.

The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a story about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's legen(less)

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Books by Richard Powers

Average rating: 3.60 · 8,302 ratings · 1,419 reviews · 52 distinct works

	The Echo Maker 3.29 avg rating — 3,287 ratings — published 2006 — 18 editions	My rating:
	Galatea 2.2 3.70 avg rating — 954 ratings — published 1995 — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Time of Our Singing 4.18 avg rating — 742 ratings — published 2002 — 15 editions	My rating:
	Gold Bug Variations 4.08 avg rating — 573 ratings — published 1991 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Generosity: An Enhancement 3.45 avg rating — 593 ratings — published 2011 — 15 editions	My rating:
	Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance 3.84 avg rating — 317 ratings — published 1985 — 8 editions	My rating:
	Gain 3.73 avg rating — 369 ratings — 6 editions	My rating:
	Prisoner's Dilemma 3.90 avg rating — 262 ratings — published 1988 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Plowing The Dark 3.61 avg rating — 329 ratings — published 2000 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Operation Wandering Soul 3.56 avg rating — 211 ratings — published 1993 — 3 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Richard Powers

“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.”
― Richard Powers

tags: librarians

30 people liked it

“Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.”
― Richard Powers

8 people liked it

“Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

7 people liked it

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Polls

Which 'new beginnings' book would you like to read in January?

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

5 votes, 29.4%

Gone by Michael Grant

5 votes, 29.4%

The Echo Maker A Novel by Richard Powers

4 votes, 23.5%

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

3 votes, 17.6%

17 total votes

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