Philipp Meyer - Career

Career

With the Swiss investment bank UBS, Meyer trained in London and Zurich and was given a position as a derivatives trader. After several years at UBS, he had written most of a novel (no relation to American Rust) and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. When attempts at publishing that novel failed, a book he has called "an apprentice-level work," Meyer took jobs as an emergency medical technician and construction worker. He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.

Not long after arriving in Austin, Meyer drove to New Orleans to do relief work during Hurricane Katrina. He arrived in the middle of the hurricane and spent several days doing emergency medical work for a local police department.

In 2010, Meyer was named in the New Yorker's list '20 under 40', their once every decade list of the 20 writers under the age of 40 that it feels are tipped for great things. In an interview to coincide with the publication of the list and his inclusion on it, Meyer revealed that was currently working on a second novel concerning "...the rise of a Texas ranching-and-oil dynasty across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries." Whereas for Meyer American Rust was about that part of America whose time has passed, the part that's on the decline," the new novel was to be "...about the part of America that is still on the rise."