Towles started writing in first grade, and years later at a Yale seminar was taken aside by Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, who saw a talent the two made a pact to cultivate. “My great-grandparents,” he allows, “would have been very comfortable in Edith Wharton’s novels.”
The upbringing outside Boston that he calls “middle class” involved private school, then Yale and Stanford. In many ways, Towles writes what he knows. “When someone slams the cup down, it’s got to sound like china hitting the table.” “If it’s a Chekhov play, and they are sitting around the table, and there’s tea on the table, that stuff can’t feel fake,” he says. The foreground, on the other hand, must be as concrete as the artifacts that bridge the worlds he creates. The author may set his stories in a specific past, but he regards history as only suggestive, like the backdrop in an opera.
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