Richard Powers (born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1957) is an American novelist whose work examines how modern science and technology shape human life. He belongs to a generation of writers who brought scientific questions into the center of literary fiction, which is why his books appeal both to readers of novels and to those curious about what genetics, computing, or ecology do to the way we feel and remember.
He grew up in a large family, one of five children. After a period in Bangkok, where his father worked at an international school, he returned to the United States at sixteen. He first studied physics at the University of Illinois but soon switched to English literature, earning his degree in 1978. Before writing full time he worked as a programmer in Boston. There, in 1980, he saw August Sander's photograph "Young Farmers" at the Museum of Fine Arts, and was inspired enough to quit his job and begin the novel that would become his debut.
That book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), braids three threads: a novella set during the First World War, a technology magazine editor obsessed with the photograph, and the author's reflections on the mechanics of photography and the figure of Henry Ford. His later novels range widely, from nuclear warfare and Disney in Prisoner's Dilemma to genetics and music in The Gold Bug Variations, and from artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2 to memory and identity in The Echo Maker (2006), which won the National Book Award for Fiction.
His work earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, a novel about nine people whose lives are bound together by trees and the destruction of forests. He has taught at the universities of Illinois and Stanford. His legacy lies in showing that the novel can engage contemporary science with technical precision and a deep concern for human lives, without either rejecting technology or celebrating it uncritically.
Key works
- Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985): his first novel, built around an August Sander photograph and the links between image, technique, and everyday life.
- Galatea 2.2 (1995): a writer works with an artificial intelligence experiment that goes wrong, reworking the Pygmalion myth.
- The Echo Maker (2006): a man suffers a head injury and believes his sister is an impostor.
- The Overstory (2018): nine people bound together by their experiences with trees, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.
Curiosities
From the lab to the page
Before becoming a novelist he worked as a programmer in Boston, having learned computing in Illinois as a user of the PLATO system.
A photograph that changed his life
By his own account, the August Sander photograph inspired him so strongly that he quit his job two days later to write a novel about the people in it.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.