George Saunders: A Survey

In just over two decades, George Saunders has achieved the kind of literary prominence that eludes most writers for life. Widely recognized as the best short-story writer in English alive today, Saunders has won the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship—not to mention four National Magazine Awards—among numerous other accolades for his fiction, nonfiction, and teaching. In this course, we take a broad view of Saunders' life and work, asking ourselves what his writing can teach us about voice, prose style, and the state of contemporary American literature more broadly. Over the term, students should expect to read extensively in service to a final creative or analytical essay on a related topic of their choosing.