Bad Luck, Bad Choices
This article profiles novelist Richard Russo, exploring how his upbringing in a working-class family influenced his literary focus on flawed, ordinary characters. It highlights the connection between his father's storytelling skills and the craft of literary revision.
Why it matters
It provides cultural insight into the American literary tradition of depicting the working class and the evolution of storytelling techniques.
Richard Russo is America’s portraitist of left-behind people in hollowed-out towns.
Illustration by Paul Spella* August 8, 2026, 8 AM ET Share Save Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 14:42 “I ’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.
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