During his time at the reform school, his father, a farmer, was diagnosed with cancer and it didn’t take long for him to pass away. In the opening sequence, he was driven to Morgen, Nebraska by the warden of Salina, the reform school he attended. Towles’ latest novel commenced in 1954 when the novel’s main character, Emmett, had to take a detour – one of many he would experience in his young life – after he accidentally killed a bully. Five years after the success of A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles made his long-awaited comeback with his third novel, The Lincoln Highway, which hit the stands in late 2021. The detour that Towles took in his life was depicted in his latest novel. His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), was equally successful, further consolidating his status as a rising literary star. It was a commercial and critical success, establishing Towles as a writer to watch out for. In 2011, he finally published his first novel, The Rules of Civility. Inspiration was hard to come by but eventually came. It was after a decade of working in the corporate world that he realized that the desire to write still burns within him. However, his dream of becoming a writer took the backseat as he had to earn a stable salary in order to support himself and his family. He credited novelist Peter Matthiessen, a naturalist and one of the founders of the popular magazine The Paris Review, as his inspiration for his writings. A series of his short stories were even published in The Paris Review in 1989.

While he was studying, he used his breaks to write. This can be gleaned from the story of American writer Amor Towles. The journey towards our destination is not always straightforward.

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