That class was also the start of an enduring friendship and literary kinship. “His aspirations for writing are to create something that in some sense or other participates in truth,” Robinson said. “His kind of humanism is based on how minds work and how senses work and how memory implants itself in the landscape and so on.”
After that class, Harding learned that Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so he decided to apply. “I was like, oh, a state school, I can get into a state school. That’s how naïve I was.”
Harding was accepted in 1998. As part of his application, he had to write two short stories, one of which was a version of “Tinkers.” Throughout the program, he worked on different novel, but, in 2000, after he had graduated, Harding had a realization: The novel was terrible. So he scrapped it, and returned to that application story, experimenting with expanding it into novel. He also began teaching writing classes at Harvard, which offered him steady work, but he was still having trouble getting “Tinkers” published.
Then he had two lucky breaks.
First, a friend of Harding’s said he was going to a dinner with a novelist friend, and that novelist friend was bringing an editor working at a new boutique press called Bellevue, and would it be OK if he mentioned Harding’s book? A week later, he got a call from Bellevue’s editorial director, Erika Goldman: the company was interested in his book.
“Tinkers” finally published in 2009, a decade after he initially started working on it. The release was small, but praise spread by word of mouth. Then lucky break No. 2 happened: Among those recommending the book was a New Hampshire bookseller, Michele Filgate. One of the people she recommended it to was Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, who, it turns out, was the chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury that year. (Sinkler is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review.) “Tinkers” won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which kick-started Harding’s career. “It was just getting shot out of a cannon,” he said.
Still, the road to “This Other Eden” was a bumpy one.
After the Pulitzer, Harding secured a two-book contract with Random House. He finished “Enon,” then began casting about for an idea for another novel, consuming everything he could find. “I’m a junkie for ephemera,” Harding said. “One thing I’ve learned as a novelist is just to not be in a hurry.”
