Dear Readers,
 
This is a letter of thanks.

When I was in first grade, a poet named David McCord came to read some of his work to our class. By the time he was finished, I knew I wanted to be a writer. That night, I read one of his books and began writing poems that were inspired by his. From that point forward, the mission of my life was simple: read, write, repeat. I read and wrote fiction in high school, read and wrote fiction in college, read and wrote fiction in graduate school.

But when I arrived in New York at the age of twenty-five and entered a career in the investment business, I set aside the writing of fiction—telling myself that I’d get back to it soon enough. Five years went by. Ten years went by. New York was thriving. Our firm grew. My circle of friends grew. I got married. We had children. In short, I had no shortage of things for which to give thanks.

But at the same time, I understood that I was betraying myself, or, at least, betraying my younger self: betraying the boy who knew with such avid certainty that he was going to be a writer—that he was a writer.

So, in what spare time I could carve out, I started a novel. It took seven years to complete, and it was no good. But my childhood mantra remained with me as an encouragement: read, write, repeat. I took what I had learned from the failed novel and started something new—that book was Rules of Civility, published ten years ago this July, when I was forty-seven.
 
I have many people to thank for the success of that book: my family and friends; my agent and the team at Viking; the independent bookstores who supported it; the readers who took a chance on reading it; you. But what I am most grateful for is that on that day ten years ago, the goodwill of this collective community allowed me to become who I had always hoped to be.

—Amor Towles