Richard Powers

• Born: June 18, 1957
• Place of Birth: Evanston, Illinois

Biography

Richard Powers has been called reclusive, but the term is misleading. Although he struggles to maintain a low profile, fearing that celebrity will make inordinate demands on the time he needs to write, he is outgoing. Interviewers find him cooperative but firm in his refusal to share the personal information around which interviews with notables often revolve.

This reluctance is not a pose Powers has adopted to project some calculated public image. He firmly believes, however, that one’s writing must stand on its merits, that details about the life of an author or an author’s autograph on the flyleaf of a book should affect neither the public perception of what authors produce nor the value of their books.

Powers’s novels display an easy command of specific information about an amazing range of subjects, from literature to art to photography to science to music to history to astronomy to folklore. His knowledge in this daunting array of subjects is not superficial: He has a thorough understanding of the subjects he chooses to explore and he absorbs complex information quickly.

An encompassing influence on Powers’s literary structure is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, stemming from his exposure to Bach’s music as a cellist. Elements of Bach’s harmony and, particularly, Bach’s counterpoint underlie the structure of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) and Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988). The Gold Bug Variations (1991) draws its title in part from Bach’s The Goldberg Variations; its structure stems from Powers’s comprehensive understanding of Bach’s inventions.

There are thirty Goldberg variations; Powers’s novel has thirty chapters. Bach’s Variations were based upon four notes or musical phrases; the number four, a controlling element in Powers’s novel, is fundamental to an understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the mysteries of which play a central role in The Gold Bug Variations. Powers’s title alludes both to Bach’s musical masterpiece and to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.” The latter correspondence alerts readers to the cryptograms and veiled allusions that pervade the novel.

An interchapter toward the end of Prisoner’s Dilemma provides a rare bit of autobiographical information about Powers. Major elements of Prisoner’s Dilemma are autobiographical, although not dependably so. In the autobiographical interchapter, for example, Powers reveals that although his fictional family consists of the Hobsons and their four children, his actual family consisted of his parents, Richard Franklin and Donna Powers, and five children. Major elements of this book, set in De Kalb, Illinois, where Powers lived during his high school years, draw upon details surrounding his father’s final illness.

Much of Operation Wandering Soul (1993) is based upon experiences that the author’s older brother, a surgeon, had when he completed a rotation as a resident in pediatric surgery in a large California hospital. In this novel, the protagonist is named Richard Kraft. Kraft is German for power, the plural form of which is the author’s name. In his other novels, Powers plays with his surname, dedicating Prisoner’s Dilemma to “the powers.”

Continuing to write into the twenty-first century, after the publication of the novels Plowing the Dark (2000) and The Time of Our Singing (2003), Powers published one of his most critically acclaimed works, The Echo Maker (2006). The book, which focuses on a young man's efforts to cope with a diagnosis of Capgras syndrome following a near-fatal accident, earned Powers the 2006 National Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. He followed up these efforts with the novels Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) and Orfeo (2014), which was long-listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

In 2018, Powers published The Overstory, a four-part tale about environmental activism and the life that exists in the natural world. The novel won Powers the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2021, he published Bewilderment, the story of an astrobiologist who turns to an experimental procedure to help his troubled son. His 2024 novel Playground, which tells the story of four people living on the forefront of ocean colonization, was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Powers, a physics major for his first two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduated in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric, completing his university studies with a perfect A average. The following fall, he entered Illinois’s master’s degree program in English, receiving the MA in 1980. For three semesters, he held teaching assistantships in composition and literature. Upon completing the master’s degree, Powers lived for nearly three years in the Boston area before returning to Champaign in 1983.

Powers, honored in 1986 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and The Gold Bug Variations were both among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Gold Bug Variations was Time magazine’s 1991 book of the year. Operation Wandering Soul was among five finalists for the 1993 National Book Award in fiction.

From 1987 until 1992, Powers lived in Heerlen, a coal-mining town in the southern tip of the Netherlands, within biking distance of Germany and Belgium. In the spring of 1992, he was artist in residence at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University in England. After he returned to the United States, he was appointed writer in residence in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1998, he became the first occupant of an all-university endowed professorship, the Swanlund Chair, a position he occupied until 2005 as a member of the department of English and the fledgling Program in Creative Writing. He retired from that position and was appointed writer in residence of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with no teaching duties. Having served as a visiting writer to the institution twice, he was officially made the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University in 2013. On May 18, 2001, he married Jane Kuntz.

Analysis

Powers has a consuming need to understand his world. He has been driven by the necessity to define—for himself and for those who read his novels—his own century, its shift from agrarianism to industrialism to modernism. His books, demonstrating the unique range of his knowledge and reflecting his experimentation with literary style and structure, consistently pose barbed questions that lead readers to serious contemplation and eventually, perhaps, to deepened understandings.

Powers’s first published novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, illustrates the complexity of his literary structure. The book’s twenty-seven chapters are arranged in triplets. One chapter of each triplet carries and sustains the story lines of the book. Another chapter is essentially a philosophical essay relating to the times and their intellectual and historical underpinnings. Yet another chapter presents a historical vignette that helps to relate the basic story to a broader sociopolitical perspective, enabling readers to understand each interlocking plot in its historical context.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, a multiplot novel, ambitiously—and deftly—sustains the three basic stories developing outside the interchapters while simultaneously interweaving them ingeniously into the whole. The first-person narration, introduced in the first chapter and used elsewhere, lends immediacy and credibility to the stories Powers unfolds.

Powers’s subsequent novels use interchapters to place their stories outside the confined milieux within which most storytelling occurs and to key the stories to their broader reference points in Western culture. Powers’s ability to relate the plot structure of his novels to what philosophers have called the “Great Chain of Being” distinguishes his work and enhances its artistic impact.

For Powers, such historical events as Henry Ford’s organization of a “Peace Ship” to convey well-known Americans to Europe at the height of World War I in his effort to negotiate a peace, or the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, or the evacuation of children from London to Canterbury during World War II are secondary but telling dollops of history that help to explain the confounding century upon which he focuses. They also enable Powers to relate his stories to the broader contexts in which they occur.

Some of Powers’s historical vignettes reach to the thirteenth century (the children’s Army of the Crusades, to which a chapter of Operation Wandering Soul is devoted); others extend beyond a single chapter to create a fuller impression of their subjects than could be gleaned from a single chapter (the Henry Ford vignettes in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, for example).

Prisoner’s Dilemma’s vignette about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II enables Powers to develop a continuing subplot. From this vignette emerges the fanciful story of an interned Walt Disney, who is released from his internment, spirited off to De Kalb, Illinois, and commissioned by the government to create a scale model of the entire United States along the lines of a theme park. Powers invents a Japanese mother for Disney to justify his internment.

Interchapters are the underlying mechanisms that allow Powers to construct his complex, multitext narratives; the interchapters provide much of the intricate counterpoint underlying the structure of his novels. This counterpoint distinguishes Powers’s writing and permits the author to employ the closely interconnected intellectual crosscurrents that mark his work.

Powers’s novels are novels of ideas. They rely on a carefully crafted and extremely calculated style to deliver the essence of what their author seeks to communicate. Powers’s chief concerns are philosophical; characters concern him secondarily, even though he has created some touching and memorable ones.

For example, the beguiling Joy Stepaneevong in Operation Wandering Soul, who remains innocent and trusting in the face of the severe dislocations she has experienced throughout her twelve years of existence, both touches the hearts and engages the emotions of those who encounter her. Joy quickly becomes a burr in readers’ social consciences.

Anyone approaching Powers’s work for the first time will be dismayed by the broad range of vocabulary upon which it draws. Technical words and terms from many fields of science and other specialized areas proliferate as the complexity of each novel grows. The scientific background of a book such as The Gold Bug Variations is extensive and reflects Powers’s scientific training, but the author reveals a sufficient understanding of the mysteries of the DNA molecule to enable him to relate the unraveling of its mysteries to such other intellectual currents as Bach’s counterpoint.

In his search for answers to the questions of existence, Powers uncovers suggestions of the interconnectedness of many human accomplishments and events. This author’s artistic quest is, simply put, to understand the universe, to try to unlock the meaning of human existence—indeed, of all existence.

Having embarked on this ambitious course, Powers works steadily, resolutely, eyes fixed unflinchingly on achieving his intellectually ambitious ends. These ends, often much clearer to him than to some of his critics, determine the direction his work takes. He permits himself no detours, no time-outs to write the occasional potboilers or television scripts that some authors use to replenish shrinking coffers. Instead he remains in the shadows, focused always on his far-reaching, long-term, self-imposed artistic and philosophical ends.

Judging from asides Powers makes in all of his books, he views authors as artists who create situations that will entice readers into interacting with ideas, dredging up from within themselves memories of experiences that will shape their interpretations of what they read. His obeisance to readers aligns Powers with reader-response enthusiasts.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

This novel uses the lives of three rural farmers who are captured in a photograph to present a striking exploration into twentieth century modernism.

In the first chapter of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, the first-person narrator happens upon a haunting August Sander photograph in the Detroit Institute of Arts while passing some hours between trains. The photograph captures three youthful peasants resplendent in weekend finery. The picture, bearing the same title as Powers’s book, is dated 1914. Given that date, the narrator reads his own meaning into the title: The dance these rural Americans are destined for is World War I.

The first narrative frame of the novel recounts the narrator’s search for basic information about the picture and, once he has gained it, about the people Sander’s lens captured. It turns out that all three—Hubert, Adolphe, and Peter—died in the war.

Yet Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is about much more than three peasants united in an obscure photograph. The book recounts in some detail the birth of twentieth-century modernism and the virtually unbelievable interconnectedness of all human events. In order to fix the story historically, Powers provides readers with recurring interchapters, all related in some way to his skillful development of the book’s three major plots.

Several historical chapters deal with the impact Henry Ford had upon American life and culture. Powers includes an interchapter on Ford’s unofficial diplomatic efforts to end World War I by chartering an ocean liner and sailing it to Norway with as many prominent people as he could cudgel into joining his midwinter voyage, hoping that this cadre of celebrities might negotiate a peace treaty. Other historical chapters treat such figures as the renowned nineteenth century actress Sarah Bernhardt, the essayist Walter Benjamin, and others whose lives impinge upon the three main stories.

The narrator’s account of his quest for information about the photograph constitutes the first narrative frame, which is related closely to the other two narrative frames and to the interchapters. The second frame is concerned with the three subjects in the picture and their simultaneously independent and historically interdependent existences. The third frame, a modern romance, concerns Peter Mays, a computer editor in Boston who pursues a haunting redheaded woman on the street, only to discover that she is an actress playing Sarah Bernhardt in a one-woman show.

Peter Mays, it turns out, has immigrated to the United States from the area that was home to Sander’s three farmers. Peter, indeed, is the son of the brightest of these, also named Peter. When the younger Peter gave his full name—Peter Hubertus Kinder Schreck Langerson van Maasricht—to immigration officials at Ellis Island, he became “Peter Mays,” the name he subsequently carries.

Sarah Bernhardt is subtly woven into each plot. Henry Ford figures in the Peter Mays story because Peter, scavenging in his mother’s attic, discovers a picture that leads him to the discovery that he might be due a $250,000 legacy from Ford’s estate. He also discovers among his mother’s possessions a print of Sander’s photograph of the three farmers, one of whom is Peter’s father.

The narrator is last seen at an office Christmas party, where he talks with Mrs. Schreck, the aging immigrant who cleans his office. She has a motherly interest in him, regularly leaving chocolate bonbons on his desk. Mrs. Schreck knows Sander’s picture and something about its subjects. She does not, however, have the answers the narrator seeks. A clandestine meeting with her in her home reveals only that the three subjects in the Sander picture “had led lives as verifiable, if not as well documented, as any of those Great Personalities I had poured over.”

The Gold Bug Variations

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

A double love story provides Powers’s pretext for this novel about genetics, DNA, music, computers, information theory, metaphysics—and, ultimately, the meaning of life.

On the surface, The Gold Bug Variations consists of two intertwined love stories, those of former DNA scientist Stuart Ressler and Jeanette Koss, Ressler’s married lover, and of reference librarian Jan O’Deigh, thirty-four, and art historian Franklin Todd, thirty. Powers’s title gives readers the initial wink. This book has something to do with Johann Sebastian Bach, the eighteenth-century composer of The Goldberg Variations, and with Edgar Allan Poe, the nineteenth-century author of “The Gold Bug.” Poe’s short story is cryptic; from the outset, Powers’s novel is equally cryptic.

Arcane meanings lurk in unexpected places throughout The Gold Bug Variations, making rereading the book perhaps more pleasurable than the initial reading. The novel overflows with word games and puzzles relating to numbers and to science; this is the sort of book that makes for challenging group reading and discussion.

Stuart Ressler, once a member of the University of Illinois team that cracked the code of the DNA molecule, has faded from public view. Franklin Todd knows him, however; Ressler works with Todd, a part-time computer hacker working nights. He fascinates Franklin. It is clear that Ressler, who now—apparently by choice—lives at the subsistence level, once experienced a little more than the fifteen minutes of public recognition that Andy Warhol suggested was every American’s due.

Eager to know more about Ressler, Todd enlists the aid of Jan O’Deigh, the reference librarian at the Brooklyn Branch of the New York Public Library. Tracking down information about Ressler (including his picture in a back issue of Life), Jan and Franklin become romantically entangled.

The plot of The Gold Bug Variations is told largely through Jan’s eyes, in a flood of recollections set loose when, during her lunch hour one day, she finds in her mail a brief note from Franklin announcing Ressler’s death. Through Franklin, Jan had met and come to know Ressler. Memories consume her. She quits her library job so that she can devote herself fully to ferreting out the meaning of Ressler’s life and, more broadly, of life in general.

Ressler’s work on DNA contained so many mysteries about the origins of existence that he, the accomplished scientist, suspected that anything able to create consciousness (life) was too complex for that consciousness to fathom. This suspicion caused Ressler to become an adult dropout from society, to live obscurely and ascetically, working of his own volition at a level considerably below his potential.

As in all of Powers’s writing, the plot is not the novel. The novel plays with ideas so profound and so complex that they defy brief or simplified presentation. The Gold Bug Variations richly rewards frequent rereading, spirited discussion, and imaginative interpretation.

Operation Wandering Soul

First published: 1993

Type of work: Novel

Set in a large California hospital’s pediatric surgical ward, this novel explores the evil that society visits upon children.

The most pessimistic of Powers’s novels, Operation Wandering Soul uses a pediatric surgical ward as the microcosm that exposes what modern American society does to its children. At the same time, the book provides Powers the opportunity to discuss the status of children in society through the ages and to highlight many of the societal dangers of the late twentieth century. Carver Hospital is located in California, near Los Angeles, where many contemporary social and ecological problems are so exaggerated that they erupt there before middle America notices them.

Richard Kraft, thirty-three, is serving a rotation at Carver as part of his surgical residency. A former musician who, at twenty, traded the conservatory for college and then medical school, Kraft passed a peripatetic youth as his family followed its father from one overseas assignment to another.

Readers encounter the sensitive youth as he is being transformed into a ward-savvy physician. He struggles against his deepest human instincts to insulate himself from the horrors he witnesses in his patients. He strives consciously to wall off his emotions so that they will not be torn to shreds by the medical realities that daily assail him.

The children on Kraft’s surgical ward are a badly afflicted lot: Joy, a twelve-year-old Asian girl with a malignant growth above her right ankle, will lose her leg; Nicolino suffers from progeria and, at puberty, is already an old man; Chuck, a preadolescent, has no face; Tony the Tuff, an adolescent, had his ear lopped off; Ben, also an adolescent, is a double amputee. Visiting this ward is not calculated to lift the spirits.

Into this mix, Powers brings Linda Espera, part physical therapist, mostly saint. She loves these children and learns as much about each of them as she can. Kraft remains aloof. Linda, however, will not countenance his professional detachment. After Kraft snares Linda sexually, she changes his outlook, adding him to her list of those she must save.

Linda plans to compose a year’s worth of historical tales relating to the lives of children through the ages; 365 tales in all. Some of these tales provide the fodder for Powers’s riveting interchapters, which deal with such stories as the Children’s Army during the Crusades, the Peter Pan story, Herod’s slaughter of the Innocents, and, as the artistic high point of the novel, the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

These stories add to Powers’s tale the historical perspective that makes his story frightening. They ask, “Has humankind learned anything from history?” while Powers’s contemporary account inquires, “Will humankind ever learn anything from history?” The answers readers inevitably reach are bound to be discouraging, which makes Operation Wandering Soul essentially pessimistic, although Powers suggests, however faintly, that hope ultimately may reside in one-on-one human relationships, in human understanding and perseverance.

Galatea 2.2

First published: 1995

Type of work: Novel

This novel offers two overlapping stories, one of which features a fictional protagonist named Richard Powers.

If Richard Powers is less than forthcoming in providing interviewers with autobiographical information, one had only to turn to two of his novels, Prisoner’s Dilemma and Galatea 2.2, to find a great deal of such information. Indeed, in Galatea 2.2, Powers goes so far as to name the novel’s fictional protagonist, Richard Powers. This novel is one of Powers’s more accessible novels. The characters he creates in it, particularly Richard Powers and C., the girlfriend he followed to the Netherlands, where he lived with her for several years, are better rounded and more human than any characters he created previously.

In this novel, Powers pursues two distinct but overlapping story lines—the Richard Powers/C. story and the Lentz/Powers story. Powers, who in the novel works at the Center for Advanced Sciences (Powers’s fictional name for the Beckman Center of the University of Illinois), first comes into contact with Philip Lentz at the Center. Lentz looks with disdain on the humanities. Familiar with Powers’s work, he dubs him “Marcel,” likening him to Marcel Proust, whose sprawling multiplot novels bear broad similarities to Powers’s writing.

One night, out boozing with friends, Lentz stumbles on Powers and asks what one has to do to qualify for a master’s degree in literature. When he learns that the degree is granted after successful completion of the prescribed course work, familiarity with the literary works on a six-page reading list, and a passing grade on a comprehensive examination that occupies two days, Lentz boasts that he could program a computer to master such a reading list and pass the requisite examination. He suggests that he and Powers embark on a project to create such a computer program within a ten-month time period. It is the story of this project that occupies the novel’s second story line.

In the course of the novel, one learns not only of the relationship that developed between the fictional Powers and C., a student in his freshman English class, but also about the devastating effect his father’s death has upon him at a crucial time in his life. Readers also learn of the profound effect that Professor Taylor, in actuality the late Professor Robert Schneider (“Schneider” is German for “tailor”), had on Powers in a seminar he took with him early in his college career. So profound an effect did this seminar have upon him that Powers switched majors from physics to English. Taylor, indeed, changed the course of Powers’s life.

The Lentz/Powers part of the story unfolds after Powers has separated from C. and has returned to the United States. Powers is shocked to learn that during the years of his relationship with C., she has been almost paralyzed emotionally through the awe in which she held him. She ends up marrying an instructor in the translating school where she is taking a four-year course, interestingly an authoritarian teacher who often reduces his students to tears.

The Lentz/Powers collaboration moves from Computer A to Computer B and continues to Computer H, when, like the robots in Karel Capek’s R. U. R. (1921), it is humanized. Its creators give it a human name, Helen, and now have only to go through the mechanics of programming it to complete their task.

Plowing the Dark

First published: 2000

Type of work: Novel

Powers intertwines two story lines, one that focuses on an American held hostage in Beirut by Muslim extremists and the other about a team effort to create a virtual world generated by computers.

Readers of Prisoner’s Dilemma will recall that in his earlier novel, Powers brought Walt Disney to De Kalb, Illinois, to create a virtual world, a scale reproduction of the entire United States, but Disney’s projected world is not computer-generated. The virtual reality portion of Plowing the Dark is related to the Microsoft Corporation, although the company is never named. The setting is Seattle, the home of Microsoft. Many of the concerns are ones that suggest Microsoft. Stevie Spiegel, involved in a project to turn a room, “The Cavern,” through computer engineering into anything one wishes—the Sistine Chapel, the pyramids of Egypt, Michelangelo’s David—calls upon a friend from his college days to help him, but he cannot reveal to her exactly what it is that he is attempting to achieve. Adie Klarpol, a disenchanted New York artist, has blind faith in what Stevie is doing, although she is not aware fully of the dimensions of his work. Her talent in art is vital to Stevie’s project with the TeraSys virtual reality team. She is to re-create past artistic events and to trace the lineage of art history to such artifacts as the Lescaux Cave paintings.

Meanwhile, Taimur Martin, thirty-three, has arrived in Beirut to teach English. He leaves a pregnant girlfriend behind in the United States. Shortly after getting to Beirut, he is kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists, thrust into holding facilities, and chained to the wall. As his confinement drags on, he creates his own virtual realities to preserve his sanity, dredging up memories from the past and shaping them into realities in his mind. At one point, after months of being held hostage and seeing no hope of escape, he attempts suicide.

Powers explores the origins of being in this novel and at one point comments, “All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They’ve now become questions of engineering.” One cannot reasonably argue that virtual reality will not change human existence perceptibly, but Powers tempers this conclusion with the virtual realities that Martin creates as a means of his own transformation during his imprisonment. His virtual realities have nothing to do with engineering.

The Time of Our Singing

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

A German Jewish refugee, a musically talented African American woman, and their children face challenges in a racially divided nation.

On the Easter Sunday of 1939, when David Strom, a German and a nonpracticing Jew who has fled from Nazi Germany, met Delia Daley, a gifted black gospel singer from Philadelphia, the two were drawn irresistibly to each other. Delia, a physician’s daughter, and David, a physicist teaching at Columbia University, were well aware of the complications that their marriage would ignite both in Delia’s family and in their own lives. Nevertheless, they married and had three children, one of whom, Joey Strom, is Powers’s narrator. Each of the children, Joey, Jonah, and Ruth (nicknamed Rootie), is gifted musically, but Jonah is a world-class tenor, who eventually flees to Europe to pursue his career in an atmosphere where he will be identified as a singer rather than as a “black singer.”

David and Delia do everything they can to protect their children from the racial difficulties that mixed-race children faced in New York—indeed, in most of the United States—at that time. They home-schooled the children, and music became the center of their lives, the unifying force that enabled them to create their own exclusive realities. It is a combination of music and physics that causes Albert Einstein to make a cameo appearance in the novel.

When the children are of an age to leave home, their parents attempt to find the most compatible situations for them, but even in racially tolerant educational institutions in Boston, they are subjected to racial discrimination on a social, if not professional, level. The story, which encompasses three generations, takes its characters through World War II, Hiroshima, the Korean War, the Kennedy brothers’ assassinations, and up to such contemporary debacles as the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the race riots in 1992 that ensued.

By the time of these riots, Rootie has become a civil rights activist. After her activist husband is killed by police, Rootie opens an alternative primary school in Oakland. Joey, who has tried various musical pursuits, now settles down to teaching music in his sister’s school. Jonah, who attempts to be apolitical, became involved in the Watts Riot on one of his return trips to the United States and was injured.

Now home again on tour, he visits with Joey in Berkeley before continuing his tour in Southern California. There he becomes involved in the riots following the King beating, is struck in the face by a police officer’s baton, and the next morning is found dead in his hotel room.

The one hope for the family now seems to be in Rootie’s bright, musically gifted son, Robert, whose life may be less scarred by racial prejudice than were the lives of his parents and uncles. It appears that Robert’s closest associations, however, will be with the black rather than with the white community.

Summary

Powers is among the most intellectually complex novelists to appear since James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. His novels are the fruits of a Renaissance mentality. Powers’s encompassing grasp of abstract ideas is impressive; more impressive still is his ability to link them to the compelling central reference points his fiction creates and to do so with a literary style consistently and dependably excellent.

Bibliography

Burn, Stephen J. and Peter Dempsey, editors. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.

Dewey, Joseph. Understanding Richard Powers. U of South Carolina P, 2002. This first full-length consideration of Powers’s writing covers his novels up to 2000.

Hurt, James. “Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 18, no. 3, 1998, pp. 24–41.

LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique, vol. 38, no. 1, 1996, pp. 12–37.

Leonard, Andrew. "The Astonishing Power of Richard Powers." Salon, 9 Feb. 2014, www.salon.com/2014/02/09/the‗astonishing‗power‗of‗richard‗powers. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.

Leonard, John. “Mind Painting.” The New York Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 1, 2001, pp. 42–48.

“Richard Powers: American Novelist.” Richard Powers Official Website, 2024, www.richardpowers.net/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.