His second book, A Gentleman in Moscow came out in 2016. In 2013, Towles retired so he devote himself to full-time writing.

Finally, in 2006, he made another effort, this time succeeding with what would become his 2011 debut novel, Rules of Civility. A decade into his financial career, he began work on a novel set in the Russian countryside, only to toss the manuscript after seven years. During that time, he never gave up the dream of becoming an author. Towles spent the next 20 years in the financial industry as director of research for Select Equity Group, an $18 billion hedge fund. For his Master's thesis, he wrote a series of five related stories that was published in the Paris Review in 1989. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow.

Currently-lives in New York City, New YorkĪmor Towles was born and raised just outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Education-B.A., Yale University M.A., Stanford University.

A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle.īefriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface.Įven as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.Įlegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent.Īrmed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.

Rules of civility book