American short story writer and essayist whose four collections — CivilWARLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), Tenth of December (2013), and Liberation Day (2022) — and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017, Booker Prize) constitute the major American satirical fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Saunders trained as a geophysical engineer (Colorado School of Mines, 1981), worked in oil exploration in Sumatra and as a technical writer at a pharmaceutical firm, and came to fiction by the indirect route of someone who had spent his twenties watching ordinary people be slowly destroyed by the language and incentives of late-capitalist work.
The Saunders story characteristically takes a dystopia just slightly more advanced than the present — a historical theme park where the workers live on-site in poverty, a chemical-trial facility where the test subjects are paid in ascending privileges, an upscale lawn ornament made of indentured Third-World women — and discovers in it a narrator whose moral imagination has been so colonized by corporate self-help vocabulary that the story's emotional force comes precisely from watching that vocabulary fail to contain what the narrator is being asked to do. The voice is the politics: Saunders is making an argument, story after story, that the language of contemporary American work is engineered to short-circuit empathy, and that fiction's job is to keep open the channels that the language is closing.
His MFA in fiction from Syracuse (1988), where he studied with Tobias Wolff and where he has taught since 1997, made him a teacher as much as a writer; A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), built from his Syracuse seminar on the nineteenth-century Russian short story, is a working writer's essay-anthology on Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol that doubles as a sustained argument for fiction as moral instrument. His 2013 Syracuse convocation address — published as the small book Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (2014) — went viral and became something close to a public sermon. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), structured as a chorus of 166 voices in the bardo state of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology where Willie Lincoln is held after his death in 1862, is the longest sustained answer Saunders has given to the question of what fiction is for.