George Saunders stood listening for an encouraging word to crackle in the receiver of a payphone on Stony Island Avenue. It was 1984, decades before his ascension to the literary heights of best-selling books, national awards and presidential interviews. He was working as a roofer and dialing from a public phone once a week to the Field Museum, looking for a career change of sorts. If they hired him as a security guard, he thought, maybe he could work his way up to curator.
“The heartbreak was, I’d be standing there in my tar-blackened flannel shirt on the corner, and the woman was so nice and she said, ‘Oh, you know, you’re kind overqualified,’” he recalled in a Zoom video interview with the Tribune from his home in California. “I was kind of circling the drain and I couldn’t figure out how to not do that.”
Saunders would eventually write about his time with the roofing crew in 2003, in an autobiographical piece that ran in the New Yorker titled “Chicago Christmas, 1984.” The city where he spent the first six years of his life before his family moved to south suburban Oak Forest makes routine appearances in his writing. His Chicago upbringing continues to influence his work today — despite now splitting his time between Santa Cruz, California, and New York, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places, and I have the kind of nature that loves where I’m living,” he said. “But that time and that place was — you know you can’t escape it — it’s just the soil that you were nurtured in.”
Saunders will return to Chicago on Feb. 9 to promote his new book “Vigil,” his fourth novel and the latest addition to a body of work boasting dozens of short stories, essays, reportage and one children’s book. The Chicago Humanities will host the event at Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park.
“Vigil” tells of a dying oil company CEO as he’s guided into the afterlife and forced to audit his many moral failings. The social commentary won’t surprise those familiar with Saunders’ work. In his 2020 short story “Love Letter,” for example, Saunders wrote of a creeping authoritarian American government through the eyes of a loving grandfather penning a self-censored missive to his troubled grandson. He now considers this fictional version of America “timid” compared to the civil unrest seen across the country, including in cities like Chicago.
“I wish I had fictionalized a different reality — that might have been helpful,” he said with a weary laugh. “I remember at the time thinking, don’t get hysterical, if it did happen here, it would happen very quietly — and now I’ve been corrected.”
But Saunders said he remembers his 20 years in the Chicago area more like a Norman Rockwell painting than the political strife humming in the background of “Love Letter.” Though he was born in Amarillo, Texas, his family soon moved to the Gage Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where they stayed until he was about 6 years old. They then settled in the suburbs.
“The thing that was unique about Chicago and I’m sure still is, is that it really is a crossroads,” he said. “You can get from the most sophisticated to the most guttural. … It’s always a kind of glow of something special happens there.”
His father owned two Chicken Unlimited franchises, one in Midlothian and another in Hazel Crest. His mother worked as a cashier.
“It was really wonderful to just watch the way he related to people. Such a charming guy and respectful, deeply respectful to everybody,” he said. “And my mom was the same. She worked as a cashier. Everybody who came in was ‘honey’ and was her friend. I’m sure I’m nostalgizing a little bit, but I really loved growing up there. It felt like you were constantly getting lessons on how to behave and how to treat other people.”
That nostalgia and wonder flows into his work as a writer, he said.
“I think also for me, the writing journey, has been in a certain way an attempt to try to figure out how to express in prose the way I felt when I was 5 or 6 in Chicago,” he said. “I always thought I’m trying to get back to the place where I find a prose style that can nail that combination of incredible beauty and looming darkness,” he said.
“It’s just so absolutely formative that I could never not be a South Side of Chicago guy.”
He gestured off the Zoom screen to confirm his allegiance to the Chicago White Sox. “I’ve got the hat right here,” he said.
He recalled once getting an autographed baseball from Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio at a car dealership on Archer Avenue.
“And then, being a complete idiot, there was one day where we needed a ball, and I’m like, OK, but you can’t drop it, so we took it out, and we got absorbed in the game,” Saunders said with a laugh. “And I still have it, but it’s almost illegible with scuff.”
A 1977 graduate of Oak Forest High School, Saunders is quick to honor the memory of his former geology teacher, Joe Lindbloom, as well as Joe’s wife, Sherry, whom he credits with getting him to college.
“I was just thinking so much about how one person, you know, changes your arc,” Saunders said. “And literally, I wouldn’t have had this life if it weren’t for him.”
Saunders wasn’t going to go to college, he recalled, but Lindbloom arranged for the “underperforming” nascent writer to be considered for the Colorado School of Mines, where Saunders would go on to acquire a bachelor’s degree in geophysical engineering.
Lindbloom was “the finest man I’ve ever met,” Saunders said. “I’ll be feeling that when I’m in Chicago — his absence, but also his presence.”
In the years since, Saunders has won the prestigious Booker Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times, among other honors, and most recently the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He’s interviewed former President Joe Biden, hipster darlings like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Jason Isbell for GQ. But his work often looks back with wonder to the city that made him.
In 2009, his essay “The View from the South Side, 1970” was published in the literary magazine Granta. The prose reveals an undeniably intimate appreciation for Chicago.
“But because you were a kid, and Chicago was all you knew,” Saunders wrote. “It was in your heart, and stayed there forever, the yardstick against which the rest of the universe was judged.”
And all these years later, Saunders says, he still remembers the kindness of that woman at the Field Museum who let the tar-stiffened writer down easy.
“In that stage of your life, to have someone say you’re overqualified is kind of nice because it’s got the word ‘qualified’ in there,” he said.
Richard Ray is a freelance writer.
“George Saunders on ‘Vigil’” is 7 p.m. Feb. 9 at Francis W. Parker School, 330 W. Webster Ave.; sold out, more information at www.chicagohumanities.org