George Saunders' path from obscurity to acclaim began some 30 years ago, not long after he finished a novel his wife could hardly stand.
“I used to think the job of serious fiction was to be completely impossible to understand,” he explained during a telephone interview. “But one day I just started to work on these Seussian poems, just to have fun with them. I showed them to my wife, and she thought they were very funny, and she said to me it was about time that anybody got enjoyment out of my work.”
