Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance | 1985 |
| Prisoner’s Dilemma | 1988 |
| The Gold Bug Variations | 1991 |
| Operation Wandering Soul | 1993 |
| Galatea 2.2 | 1995 |
| Gain | 1998 |
| Plowing the Dark | 2000 |
| The Time of Our Singing | 2003 |
| The Echo Maker | 2006 |
| Generosity: An Enhancement | 2009 |
| Orfeo | 2014 |
| The Overstory | 2018 |
| Bewilderment | 2021 |
| Playground | 2024 |
About Richard Powers
Richard Powers (born 18 June 1957 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American novelist whose books explore the effects of modern science and technology. He has published fourteen novels, winning the National Book Award for Fiction for “The Echo Maker” in 2006 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “The Overstory” in 2019.
One of five children, Powers moved with his family to Bangkok at the age of 11, when his father took a post at the International School Bangkok, and returned to the United States at 16. He enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study physics, switched to English literature in his first semester and took a BA in 1978 followed by a master’s degree. He had learned computer programming at Illinois and moved to Boston to work as a programmer.
In 1980 he saw August Sander’s 1914 photograph “Young Farmers” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and quit his job two days later to write a novel about the men in it. “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance” appeared in 1985 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Powers then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “The Gold Bug Variations”, a novel about genetics, music and computer science. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989.
“Operation Wandering Soul” (1993) was a National Book Award finalist, and “Galatea 2.2” (1995) retells the Pygmalion story through an artificial intelligence experiment. “Gain” (1998), about a 150-year-old chemical company and a woman living near one of its plants, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. “The Echo Maker” concerns a Nebraska man who suffers a head injury in a truck accident and comes to believe that the sister caring for him is an impostor.
“The Overstory” (2018) follows nine Americans whose experiences with trees draw them together to resist the destruction of forests; it was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “Bewilderment” (2021), about an astrobiologist and his troubled son, reached the Booker shortlist too, and “Playground” (2024) was longlisted. Powers has taught at the University of Illinois, where he is professor emeritus of English, and at Stanford University.
Photo: Phoebe, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).