So he read books of the time, including Sloan Wilson's 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit' and Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' to get a handle on American culture right before rock and roll transformed it.Īll of his novels have been historical fiction but Towles is much more interested in the 'fiction' than the 'historical' part. Towles isn't a big researcher - he does his noodling on the internet after his first draft is done, to fill in gaps and details - but he knew that 'Lincoln,' which is set in 1954, should seem like a book written then.

Emmett and Billy, whose father recently died, agree to follow the titular highway from their Nebraska home to San Francisco, where their mother lives, but their trip is diverted by the stowaways, who involve them in adventures with Manhattan vaudevillians, authors and low-level gangsters. The latter returns from a year in juvenile detention as the book opens, only to discover escapee inmates Duchess and Woolly hid in his trunk during the trip home. Its main characters are an eerily wise child named Billy and his teenage brother, Emmett. 'The Lincoln Highway' counts down from Day 10 to Day 1. So when I had the idea of kids hidden in the trunk of a car, it came with the idea that it would last about 10 days.' 'When I had the idea of a guy who is trapped in a hotel, it came with the idea that it was a 30ish-year span.

'Long before I write the book, I'll have a pretty complete sense of where it takes place, when it takes place, how long its duration is,' said Towles via Zoom from his book-lined study in New York.

It's as if most of its elements were there all the time, waiting for him to get busy. He always has several potential novels percolating and, when he begins writing, he enters fully into that world. Towles, who will be at the Fitzgerald Theater on Wednesday as part of the Talking Volumes series, resets each time he starts a new book. Amor Towles' novels, including the bestseller 'A Gentleman in Moscow' and his new 'The Lincoln Highway,' are so distinctive that they read like the works of different writers.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles