by Suzanne Daub
By all outward measures, Richard Russo has had the kind of literary career many writers only dream about — a Pulitzer Prize, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, beloved novels adapted for film and television, and a body of work spanning four decades that has made him one of the defining voices of working- class American fiction. But spend time with the author and you understand that none of it came easily, and none of it was guaranteed.
Russo was born and raised in Gloversville, New York, a post-industrial town in the Mohawk Valley whose fortunes had faded by the time he was growing up. It is a place he spent much of his young life trying to escape. When his parents separated, his mother took him to Martha’s Vineyard for two weeks, a trip that left a lasting impression. “She was desperate to escape,” Russo recalled, “and she wanted me to understand there were much better, much more beautiful other places in the world…we never went back again, but I think I learned her lesson.” And then, in the way of many writers, he spent the next half-century revisiting his home town in his novels .
“Much of my adult life and my fiction has been a result of the fact that my mother and father presented me with two different visions of America that I have spent my life trying to reconcile.” His father, a war hero who returned home convinced that the country would not change for him or for anyone like him, represented one reality. His mother, “was all in on America,” and wanted Richard to take advantage of all that was available.
The tension between the America that could be and the America that was left behind is a current running through Russo’s writing.
Russo came to fiction by a circuitous route. He studied at the University of Arizona and went on to earn a PhD in English, then “I walked across the hall from the English Department to the Creative Writing Department. There was a wonderful teacher there: I said ‘I think I’d like to write.’” The teacher told him simply “write something.” He did. “It was awful,” said Russo, but “the fuse was lit.”
He went on to earn an MFA and spent years trying to become the kind of writer he had imagined himself being: a crime novelist working in the tradition of Ross Macdonald and James M. Cain: “I wanted to write crime novels set in Los Angeles.” But he had never lived in LA, and it showed. “I was a tourist in a place I never knew.” When he gave his first book-length manuscript to his mentor, Bob Downs, Downs handed it back and told him the truth: “it was pretty much inert.”
But there were forty pages in that manuscript set in a mill town in upstate New York, pages that Downs told him were alive. “I could have killed him,” Russo admits. “It was what I was trying to run away from.” He resisted the truth as long as he could, but when he finally gave in and wrote about the world he actually knew, something opened up. “I wasn’t gonna be the writer I imagined I would be,” he said, “but I was gonna be a writer. Once I dove into that world I couldn’t write fast enough.”
His first published novel, Mohawk, appeared in 1986, when Russo was in his early thirties and teaching at a branch of the University of Pennsylvania. It established themes that would define his work: the fading industrial Northeast, the weight of place on people’s lives, comedy and tragedy intertwined.
Recognition came to Russo incrementally: “If there’s one thing that will kill you as an artist is believing it will be easy,” he commented. He was awarded 1990 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1990. Empire Falls (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, securing his place in the literary canon. His novel That Old Cape Magic was named an Indie Choice Book Award Honor Book. In 2017, he was honored with a Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. Bridge of Sighs, a book he nearly abandoned, was published in 2007 and was selected as Oprah’s Book Club pick for August 2025, a recognition that surprised even Russo, given how many years had passed since that novel’s original publication.
Russo’s work has translated well to the screen. Nobody’s Fool was adapted into a 1994 film directed by Robert Benton, with Paul Newman in the lead role of Sully Sullivan. Newman and Russo developed a friendship through the project, and Russo spoke about the experience of watching the actor inhabit his character, a figure based on Russo’s father. One scene in the film stands out in Russo’s memory. In the novel and in early drafts of the script, Sully delivers a long monologue explaining why he was absent from his son’s life. On set, Paul Newman asked them to simply put the camera on his face. “The scene that was shot has Paul Newman delivering one line instead of five pages of explanation,” Russo recalled. “It is just wonderful.”
Empire Falls was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2005, starring Ed Harris and Helen Hunt, with Newman in a supporting role. Straight Man, Russo’s satirical novel of academic life, was adapted for Paramount+ in 2024. The author did not spend much time on set for either production: “the greatest gift a writer can give a director is to not be on set.”
He is eager to see more of his work adapted. “I want to see them all,” he said, though he acknowledges that Hollywood has been in considerable disarray of late, with projects that had been gaining momentum now stalling.
Few relationships between an author and his characters have been as long and emotionally resonant as the one between Richard Russo and Sully Sullivan — the aging, irascible, perpetually unlucky handyman at the center of Nobody’s Fool (1993), Everybody’s Fool (2016), and Somebody’s Fool (2023).
Russo insists that when he finished Nobody’s Fool, he considered the story complete. “When I finished that book, I was done.” The long gap between the first and second installments reflects that conviction. What changed? Partly it was the pull of unfinished emotional business. Going back to North Bath, the fictional upstate New York town where the novels are set, felt like “visiting old friends.” He missed them. And Sully had taken on additional layers of meaning after Paul Newman brought the character to life on screen. Going back to North Bath was, in part, an act of mourning and of tribute. Writing Everybody’s Fool meant Russo could spend more time with his father and, in a sense, with Paul Newman, who died in 2008. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Chief of Police Raymer in Nobody’s Fool, died in 2014: Russo has said he channeled Hoffman entirely while writing Chief of Police Raymer in Everybody’s Fool.
When asked if he writes for fun or if it’s a compulsion, he replied “yes to both.” Russo writes every morning, longhand in notebooks. “Two pages is a good day” he explained. “By the end of the year, you’ll have something the size of a book… you won’t have a book because you would have screwed up a number of times or a character says something you didn’t expect and you start again.”
Then he steps away: “I walk three miles a day, and I try to clear my mind as much as possible. Strangely enough, by trying to clear my mind, I almost invariably find myself rushing home to make some notes on what occurred to me during the walk.”
In the afternoon, he transfers his morning’s work to a computer; that transcription is, in effect, the first rewrite. Then he reads. Eighty books last year, he estimates: literary novels, thrillers, nonfiction. “I love Ann Patchett’s work; I’ve read Elizabeth Strout’s newest; right now I’m reading Douglas Stuart’s John of John… it’s terrific, completely immersive.”
The hardest part of writing a novel, he says, is the beginning—and the beginning lasts longer than you think. The first third of any book is, for Russo, a process of constant rewriting, discovering where the story actually starts, which is rarely where you thought it did. “Ann Patchett told me once when struggling with a novel ‘I would remind myself that no matter how many times you do it, no matter how many novels…despite you are supposed to know how to do this…you find yourself in the same situation: you start a book, you write (for me it is around 75 pages), and you realize you started in the wrong place. You start again, and then the fact that you corrected the problem once does not mean you won’t have to go back and start again.’
“The first third of the book you’re just gonna rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. The second third won’t take nearly as long because you have closed a number of narrative doors. By the last third, most of the narrative doors are closed… it should be a race to the finish.”
One novel that Russo nearly abandoned was Bridge of Sighs. Two hundred and fifty pages in, with three equally important protagonists and no clear path forward, he sent the manuscript to his agent. “I’m lost,” he told him. “I may have to put this aside. I think I have three books here.” His agent read it, made suggestions, and saved it. “I was ready to throw in the towel on that one.”
Russo’s most latest book is a thriller that he describes as “both a departure for me and a homecoming.” Due out this August, Under the Falls follows Tyler Sinclair, a musician who left his upstate New York hometown only to be brought back by his manager for a gig, where Sinclair discovers that not everyone has fond memories of him.
“No doubt about it: it is a thriller,” he commented, “and there is crime in it, but unlike many thrillers that are plot-driven, this book is character-driven and place-driven, like all my other novels.” His editor at Knopf, when she first read the opening, told him to let the thriller form “genuflect” to him. She advised him to set the place first, before he put the characters in motion. Lenses of place and class, which have always been central to his work, remain central in this novel.
Asked what tips he would give to writers starting out, Russo said “Expect it to take awhile…Try not to be too hard on yourself: what you’re doing is really difficult…As an artist you can be very hard on yourself, especially when things aren’t going well.”
Most importantly, he said, “Don’t be too self-absorbed…find a way to get out of your own way. Your characters are so much more important than you are…get out of yourself and devote all your attention to them.”
“As with most things that have something to do with art… painting, music, writing… there is a feeling of must that you have… that feeling comes long before you have the ability.”
As his birthday approaches, Richard Russo just finished a new short story set on Martha’s Vineyard, that place his mother first showed him as a boy. He is, as he put it simply, never not working on a novel.
One of the Featured Authors during the 15th Annual Nantucket Book Festival this weekend, Richard Russo will be in conversation with the Nantucket Book Foundation’s Administrative Director Chrissy Brown on Friday, June 12 at 2 pm in the Methodist Church, 2 Centre Street. They’ll reflect on Russo’s signature portrayal of small town American living, the nuances of family dynamics, the challenges of contemporary literature, and his years of reading and writing.
