About this item
The debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The SonBONUS: This edition contains a reader's guide.Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
About the Author
Philipp Meyer grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, where he dropped out of high school and got a GED. After five years working as a bike mechanic and an orderly in a trauma center, he decided to attend college, getting into Cornell University at the age of 22. He graduated with a degree in English and he got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader. After paying off his student loans, he left Wall Street hoping write full time, but after several years of failure moved back to Baltimore and took jobs as an EMT and construction worker. In 2005 he received a fellowship from the University of Texas's Michener Center for Writers. In 2009 he published his first novel American Rust, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was an Economist Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book of the Year, and made numerous other "best-of" list. Meyer is a Guggenheim Fellow and one of the second generation of the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40. His second novel, The Son, is being published in fifteen languages. He lives mostly in Austin, Texas.
