He's an American classic, such a profound writer.

It's hard to believe Amor Tolls began his career as an investment banker on Wall Street,

where he worked for over 20 years.

Initially, he wrote in a spare time during nights and on weekends,

and eventually he finished Rules of Civility, published in 2011. It became a bestseller that year,

and the rest is history. He went on to write a gentleman in Moscow, which spent 59 weeks on

the New York Times bestseller list.

Tolls has sold more than 6 million copies of his novels, translated into more than 30 languages.

They've earned him tons of accolades, including landing him on Bill Gates and Barack Obama's annual book recommendation lists.

And not to mention, his latest novel, The Lincoln Highway,

was a read-with-Genna Book Club pick back in 2021. I had the chance to sit down with Tolls most

recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival with an audience full of fans, where we talked about

what led him to writing as a child and dug into the inspiration behind each of his novels.

I'm Jenna Bush-Hagar. Welcome to Read with Jenna.

Thank you. I am so happy to be here with somebody that I adore. So thank y'all all for being here.

Thank you.

Okay, so Amor, there's a part of your life story that is so wild.

It reads like a bit of one of your novels.

Take us back to when you were 10 years old and that message in a bottle.

What Jen is mentioning is when I was about 10 years old, my family would summer off the coast of Massachusetts on Martha's on Ireland Island, and I threw a note in a bottle into the ocean.

And I think the first sentence says, you know, to whoever finds is, I hope it made it to China.

That was my vision. So this is late in August. The summer ends.

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