American Rust

American Rust

First Edition cover
Author	Philipp Meyer
Cover artist	Matthew Lenning
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, Novel
Publisher	Spiegel & Grau
Publication date	24 February 2009
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	367
ISBN
Dewey Decimal	813.6
LC Class	PS3613.E976

American Rust is American writer Philipp Meyer's debut novel, published in 2009. Set in the 2000s, American Rust takes place in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which is in a rural region referred to as "the Valley" of dilapidated steel towns. American Rust focuses on the decline of the American middle class, good-paying manufacturing jobs, and the general sense of economic and social malaise of what has become known as the New Gilded Age. Meyer's novel received rave reviews from book critics; many publications ranked it one of the best novels of 2009.

American Rust was published in 2009 in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and The Netherlands (in Dutch); in 2010 it was published (in translation) in France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Israel, Greece, and Serbia.

The structure of American Rust is that of a third person, stream-of-consciousness work influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. Comparisons to other books vary somewhat, but mostly include works by modernist writers. The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the works of Faulkner. Roger Perkins of the UK Telegraph, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, and Ron Charles of The Washington Post compared it to the works of Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and J.D. Salinger. Geordie Williamson, head literary critic of The Australian, compared Meyer to Steinbeck in a radio interview, saying "John Steinbeck is alive and well, and his name is Philipp Meyer." Williamson also compared Meyer to Sinclair Lewis and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his printed review of American Rust in The Australian.