Meyer worked as a first responder for about 15 years, mostly part-time. In his early twenties he volunteered as an orderly at the
R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in downtown Baltimore. He served as a volunteer firefighter at fire departments in Maryland and upstate New York. He was one of the first outside EMTs to respond to
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, driving his own vehicle to New Orleans and arriving on the day of the storm. Meyer also spent a few years working on Wall Street. After graduating from college, he took a job with the Swiss investment bank
UBS as a
derivatives trader. He has called his experience there "soul-crushing" His second novel,
The Son, was published in 2013. After the publication of
The Son, Meyer decided to explore work in Hollywood as a sideline to writing books. He developed
The Son as a television show and co-founded a production company (which was dissolved after a few years). In a 2023 interview with
Ryan Holiday, Meyer said he found it almost impossible to balance working in television with writing books and that he had returned to writing books. He said he had spent most of the previous decade working on his third novel, The City. AMC adapted
The Son as a television series that ran for several seasons. Showtime and Amazon adapted
American Rust into a television show. The second season premiered in 2024.
American Rust Most of
American Rust was written during Meyer's time at the Michener Center (2005–2008). In December 2007 the novel was acquired by
Spiegel & Grau, a
Random House imprint.
American Rust was eventually acquired by publishers in 23 countries and translated into 17 languages. It is a third-person,
stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as
James Joyce,
William Faulkner,
Virginia Woolf, and
James Kelman.
American Rust was a winner of the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2009). Reviewers in the UK's
The Daily Telegraph,
The Plain Dealer in
Cleveland, and
Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "
Great American Novel".
The Son While finishing
American Rust, Meyer sought another subject through which he could explore what he felt was the "creation myth of America". Meyer's original vision for
The Son was quite different from the final novel; it originally featured "six or seven characters”, was "set in the present day", and "was conceived [...] as a book about the rise of a family dynasty and America’s relationship with war and violence." He saw the potential for a novel about the Bandit Wars and the "creation myth of Texas"
The Son was published in May 2013. It was described in press releases as "an epic of Texas", with a plot about "three generations of a Texas family: Eli, his son Pete and Pete’s daughter Jeanne. Each face their own challenges—Comanche raiders, border wars and a changing civilization, respectively." Meyer called the work-in-progress a "partly historical novel about the rise of an oil and ranching dynasty in Texas, tracing the family from the earliest days of white settlement, fifty years of open warfare with the Comanche, the end of the frontier and the rise of the cattle industry, and transitioning into the modern (oil) age. The rise of Texas as a power pretty closely parallels America's rise to global power, for obvious reasons. And I wanted to write about the parts of America that are growing, rather than declining." Meyer has said that he has conceived
The Son as the second part of a trilogy of novels that began with
American Rust. and won the
Lucien Barrière Prize and the Prix Littérature-Monde in France. It was also long listed for the
International Dublin Literary Award.
The City Meyer's third novel will be published in 2026, according to sources online. Meyer has described The City as his longest and most ambitious book, which took nearly ten years to write. Meyer intended
The City to be a modern take on Dante's
Divine Comedy, with elements of magical realism, dystopian fiction, and science fiction. It takes place at the end of the world. Like his other novels, it has multiple points of view, interlocking stories, and stories within stories. ==Bibliography==