Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer (born May 3, 1974) is an American fiction writer, and is the author of the novels American Rust and The Son, as well as short stories published in The New Yorker and other places.

Meyer also created and produced the AMC television show based on his novel.

He was one of the first outside EMTs to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans, driving his own vehicle there 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 describes his experience there as "soul-crushing" but also maintained friendships with many of his old colleagues.

After several years at UBS, Meyer committed to pursuing his dream of becoming a writer.

He wrote a second novel that he could not get published, a book he has called "an apprentice-level work".

He moved back into his parents' house in Baltimore, taking jobs driving an ambulance and as a construction worker.

He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.

The bulk 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.

Random House bought American Rust at the end of 2008.

Meyer won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.

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".

Toward the end of composing American Rust, Meyer sought to find 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." After two and a half years working on this version, Meyer realized that "these characters were talking about this legendary guy, and they were commenting on the American myth, in a way.

In 2010, Meyer was named to The New Yorker's "20 under 40", its decennial list of 20 promising writers under the age of 40.

During his time at the Michener Center, Meyer met fellow writer Kevin Powers, who later wrote the 2012 Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds.

In 2013, Meyer finished work on his novel The Son, and began developing it as a TV show, along with some University of Texas classmates.

He co-founded a television production company, El Jefe, but it dissolved a few years later.

He won the 2014 Lucien Barrière prize in France and the 2015 Prix Littérature-Monde Prize in France.

In 2016, AMC picked up The Son as a television series starring Pierce Brosnan.

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."

Various outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and the UK's Telegraph have compared his writing to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and J. D. Salinger.

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 about Baltimore.

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 his hometown and at 21, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University.

Cornell was a hugely positive experience for Meyer, who reflected that “All of the sudden I wasn’t alone." During his time at Cornell, Meyer wrote a 600-page novel that was never published, later dismissing it as "self-indulgent undergrad nonsense". Meyer graduated from Cornell with a degree in English and many years later received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

Meyer worked as a first responder on and off for nearly fifteen years.

In his early twenties he volunteered as an orderly at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in downtown Baltimore.

He would later serve as a volunteer firefighter in fire departments outside Baltimore and in rural New York State.

In 2019, Showtime announced they were adapting Meyer's first novel into a show called Rust, starring Jeff Daniels