Richard Powers

Peter Mailloux (The Citadel)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 18 Jun 1957
Activity 1985-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States; Netherlands

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Richard Powers has been called America's “greatest living novelist”, “its Amost ambitious novelist”, its “smartest novelist”, its “pre-eminent novelist of ideas”, and (ironically often) its best writer no one has ever heard of. He has been compared to Tolstoy, Melville, Joyce and Proust. His nine books, which he has described as an ongoing attempt to “say what it means to be alive”, have been celebrated by critics and won almost every award imaginable; they seem certain to spawn Ph.D. dissertations for generations to come. The best way to sum him up, though, may be his own definition of an ideal writer: “one capable of reinventing herself with each new project.”

For a long time Powers did his utmost to k…

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3310 words

Citation: Mailloux, Peter. "Richard Powers". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 February 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11769, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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