On March 15, the Wilkes-Barre community gathered to gain inspiration, stories, and knowledge from the award-winning author Amor Towles at the annual Rosenn Lecture at the Dorothy-Dickson Darte Center. The Rosenn Lecture Series honors the Honorable Judge Max Rosenn and was established at Wilkes University in 1980.
Amor Towles is a bestselling American novelist and author of four novels: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, The Lincoln Highway, and, most recently, Table for Two, along with several other published short stories. With over eight million copies sold, each of his novels has been New York Times bestsellers. Towles graduated from Yale and received an MA in English from Stanford. After twenty years working as an investment professional, he now writes full-time.
This spring, Amor Towles spoke with Wilkes students in a short Q&A session before the lecture. He spoke about when he first knew his path was writing fiction, in his 1st-grade classroom. After a visit from a poet, Towles explained that he was so infatuated with writing, stories, and poetry that he knew it was his passion.
Towles explained that he liked reading The Hardy Boys growing up, but he later became drawn to deeper psychological thrillers in his teen years. Throughout high school, he wrote constantly and stated he was always on “the hunt” for literature.
Moving to New York City at twenty, Towles said he felt “a little lonely, and a little claustrophobic in the city… so I got involved in an investment firm… and didn’t write for almost twenty years.” But he knew he would feel unfilled by fifty if he didn’t return to the world of literature. Spending seven years writing a novel he claimed he “did not like very much,” he eventually published Rules of Civility in 2011 at age forty-six.
Students at the Q&A asked him about his writing process and where he draws inspiration from. Towles said his stories are inspired by small, personal experiences. For example, he explained that during his time in NYC, he was walking in Central Park when he spotted a man roller-skating, standing out from the crowd with perfect posture and stature, which inspired him to write I Will Survive, a short story in Table for Two.
Following this up, Towles described that he does not research or write about things unfamiliar to him, explaining, “I don’t know these worlds well enough to create with confidence,” providing an example of his passion for Russian culture, which aided him in writing A Gentleman in Moscow.
After the Q&A, students, faculty, and staff of Wilkes University, along with citizens of Wilkes-Barre, gathered for his lecture, moderated by Dr. David Hicks, director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. Towles shared his stories, thoughts, knowledge, and so much more with the Wilkes-Barre community, and Wilkes University is grateful to honor Judge Max Rosen at the 2026 Rosenn Lecture with guest speaker, award-winning, best-selling novelist, Amor Towles.
