Philipp Meyer
Philipp Meyer's novel, American Rust, was an Economist Book of the Year, a Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009, a New York Times Notable Book, A Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009, and an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009.
Philipp Meyer grew up in Baltimore, dropped out of high school, and got his GED when he was sixteen. After spending several years working as a bike mechanic and volunteering at a trauma center in downtown Baltimore, he attended Cornell University, where he studied English. Since graduating, Meyer has worked as a derivatives trader at UBS, a construction worker, and an EMT, among other jobs. His writing has been published in McSweeney's, The United States of McSweeney's, The Best of McSweeney's 11-20, Esquire UK, The Iowa Review, The Independent (UK), Salon.com, and New Stories from the South. From 2005 to 2008 Meyer was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. He splits his time between Texas and upstate New York.
“And one day...there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn't know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.”
“There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream.”
“And then...it wasn't just that we lost all those jobs, it was that people didn't have anything to be good at anymore. There's only so good you can be about pushing a mop or emptying a bedpan. We're trending backwards as a nation, probably for the first time in history, and it's not the kids with the green hair and bones through their noses. Personally I don't care for it, but those things are inevitable. The real problem is the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at. You lose that, you lose the country.”
“You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”
“But of course they hadn't done anything. They'd all be born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They'd worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted- the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admtted how spoiled they were but underneadth, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.Of course, she hadn't said word. She wished she had but she hadn't. It was easy now to look back and think these things, but at the time she'd wanted to fit in and go along with Bunny and think yes I deseve this happy life I'm living. ”
“Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard- you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. ”
“It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night...He didn't see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn't anything more to it than that. ”