| A Brief
Biographical Sketch excerpted and adapted, with the author's permission,
from Understanding Richard Powers by Joseph Dewey.
 Powers's
characters themselves shift between the impulse to connect and its
inevitable crash and burn; between the Emersonian urge to embrace the
difficult ad-lib of the world and the Dickinsonesque need to recoil from
its evident bruising into the supple sanctuary of the aesthetic
enterprise, to withdraw into the secured refuge of a novel, a piece of
music, a movie house, a museum, even cyberspace. Although long reluctant
to encourage the distraction of biography, Powers has lived--like his
characters--sustained within a curiously similar geography; never quite at
home, never quite comfortable with belonging, shifting between engagement
and escape. Powers was born 18 June 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, the fourth
of five children, two older sisters and a brother and one younger brother.
Early on, in the mid-1960s, his father, a high school principal with a
working-class background, moved the family to the north Chicago suburb of
Lincolnwood, an older neighborhood, Powers recalls, that was heavily
Jewish. "My sisters and brothers and I would be just about the only kids
in school for the high holy days."
He continues, "I always had a sense that
we weren't quite native, a self-image compounded when we moved to Bangkok
right before my eleventh birthday." Powers then spent what he has
frequently described as five "eye-opening" years in Thailand when his
father accepted an appointment with the International School of Bangkok
during the height of the American military presence in Southeast Asia.
Amid such dramatic relocations, the young Powers discovered the aesthetic
sanctuary: he tapped into both a sustaining love of music (an accomplished
student of vocal music, he trained in the cello but also plays guitar,
clarinet, and saxophone) and a restless curiosity fed by voracious
reading. He recounts the impact of both the Iliad and the
Odyssey (testimony again to a position between, on the one hand, the
realist's impulse to record the world with the historian's eye and, on the
other, the poet's privilege to invent with the license of the unleashed
imagination). His earliest reading passion, however, was for nonfiction,
specifically biographies and science (he has cited particularly the impact
of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle--which he read, amazingly enough,
in fourth grade). He recalls, in part because of the panicked surge of
interest in science following the Sputnik launch, the notion that he was
somehow "destined to be a scientist." Thus, as a teenager, he explored
careers in paleontology, oceanography, and archaeology before ultimately
choosing physics.
In his formal studies, however, Powers would soon find himself pulled
between science and the arts. In 1975, he enrolled as a physics major at
the University of Illinois. Following a pivotal course, an honors seminar
taught by Robert Schneider, a charismatic teacher and an accomplished
Freudian critic who Powers recalls convinced him that literature was the
"perfect place for someone who wanted the aerial view," he changed to
English/rhetoric when he realized, with some frustration, that the
sciences demanded, even encouraged, an intolerable specialization. In his
literary studies Powers was drawn to the intricate narrative structurings
of the first-generation European modernists (particularly the work of
Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce) and to the emotional dramas
of Thomas Hardy--again Powers locating himself in between, drawn to both
highly experimental modernism with its conception of the novel as a
self-justifying architectural form and the compelling tradition of
narrative realism that trained the open eye on the world itself. Powers
completed his M.A. in late 1979. But the humanities could not provide
Powers a secure space. He elected not to pursue doctoral studies as he
feared finding in literary theory and criticism the same limiting need to
specialize.
Powers moved to Boston in January 1980
and worked as a computer programmer and freelance data processor, skills
he had developed ruing his off-hours learning the massive computer network
systems at Illinois. Computer programmer by day, he continued his eclectic
reading program, ingesting volumes of history, sociology, political
science, aesthetics, and hard science theory, as well as a wide range of
novels and poetry--"random pleasures, all over the map." He lived near the
Museum of Fine Arts, where he would spend Saturdays (admission was free
before noon), and where, one week, he chanced upon an exhibit that
included August Sander's 1914 black-and-white photograph of three
Westerwald farm boys heading, according to the title, to a dance. The
image haunted Powers. "All of my previous year's random reading just
consolidated and converged on this one moment, this image, which seemed to
me to [be] the birth photograph of the twentieth century."
Within forty-eight hours he quit his job
to devote himself to producing his first novel,
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,
a project that took more than two years. "I thought: I'm going to put
everything that I know in this book, because I'm never going to get
another shot at this...Afterwards, I figured, I'd have to go back and do
jobs that people are willing to pay for." That novel, which explores the
tectonic impact of artistic images, met with significant critical success,
much to Powers's surprise. Encouraged by the realization that he could
make a living from writing, Powers moved to southern Holland--in part to
withdraw from the distractions of his initial success in the United States
but more to immerse himself in that region's fascinating play of multiple
languages and dialects and to secure the distance necessary to finish the
draft of his second novel,
Prisoner's Dilemma, an unsettling work that audaciously juxtaposed
Disney and the logic of nuclear warfare, a novel that Powers has described
as his most American work.
While still in the Netherlands Powers completed his landmark work,
The Gold Bug Variations, a dense and
luminous story of love and death that intricately braids the metaphors of
genetics, computer science, and polyphonic music. Two years after Gold
Bug Powers published the much darker
Operation Wandering Soul,
which chronicled the slow-motion meltdown of a young resident-doctor
confronting the harrowing realities of a pediatrics ward in a Los Angeles
public hospital. Work on that manuscript was done during a yearlong stay
in Cambridge and then completed when Powers returned stateside in 1992 to
accept a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois.
Powers would use this academic experience to fashion
Galatea 2.2, an ingenious
retelling of the Pygmalion story using a bizarre university computer
experiment in which an eccentric neurologist, assisted by a young,
successful writer named Richard Powers, attempts to teach a computer
network to respond to literature.
This alternating pattern of darkness and affirmation, doubt and
celebration--the shifting from Emerson to Dickinson--marks his most recent
work as well. In 1998 Powers published Gain,
a disturbing narrative of an Illinois woman coming to terms at midlife
with ovarian cancer most likely caused from the environmental carelessness
of a nearby chemical plant, who two-hundred-year history Powers relates in
alternating chapters. But in his follow-up work, the mesmerizing
Plowing the Dark (2000),
Powers chronicles both the grand efforts of a Seattle-based computer
research team to produce the first self-contained virtual reality
environment and the poignant narrative of an American teacher held hostage
for four brutal years by Islamic fundamentalists in Beirut, a prisoner
left to the devices of his imagination, the first virtual reality machine.
Named in 1996 to Illinois's endowed Swanlund Chair in English and
appointed to the Center for Advanced Study (1999), Powers continues to
write, teach, and travel. He has recently completed his eighth novel, a
sprawling generational study titled
The Time of Our Singing
(January 2003), with the properly ambitious themes of racial identity, the
iterations of history, and the power of music. [...]
At Illinois Powers teaches a graduate seminar in multimedia authoring and
an undergraduate course in the mechanics of narrative, and he has
undertaken stints at other universities as well. He was elected a Fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. Powers has been awarded a MacArthur Fellow
(1989) and is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award (1999). In
that same year, he
was named one of five "Writers of the Decade" by Esquire magazine.
Other awards he has been given for the body of his work include the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and the Dos Passos Prize For
Literature.
© 2002 by Joseph Dewey
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