American Rust was a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2009) among other recognitions. Reviewers in the UK's The Telegraph, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel." The bulk of American Rust was written during Meyer's time at the Michener Center (2005–2008).
In December 2007 an early version of American Rust was acquired by Spiegel & Grau, a Random House imprint. Between December 2007 and May 2008, Meyer made significant changes to the manuscript, lengthening the book by 30%. Further significant changes were made between the version published as the advanced readers copy (based on the May 2008 manuscript) and the final hardback (based on changes made between May 2008 and October 2008). American Rust was acquired by publishers in sixteen countries and scheduled for translation into eleven languages. It is a third person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. While a reviewer in The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the work of Faulkner, various other reviewers, including Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, Ron Charles of The Washington Post, and Taylor Antrim writing in The Daily Beast, have favorably compared Meyer to a wide variety of more traditional writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Dennis Lehane.
In 2010, after receiving his Guggenheim Fellowship, Meyer began work on a second novel under the working title American Son.
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