67 pages • 2 hours read
Amor TowlesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Timothy Touchett, an aspiring novelist, moves from Boston to New York City in the late 1990s. Timothy works as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, and he studies the lives and craft of famous authors for inspiration. He fears that he does not have any stories worthy of a novel, so his studies serve as a distraction. Peter Pennybrook approaches Timothy one afternoon at the New York Public Library, while Timothy is studying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s signature in a letter to the famous editor Maxwell Perkins. Pennybrook offers Timothy a job in his bookstore, which Timothy accepts, excited to work closer to his chosen field.
On Timothy’s first day of work, Pennybrook asks about Fitzgerald’s signature discovers that Timothy has a talent for forging signatures with additional elements of emotion and style, which reveal the real signer’s position in life. Pennybrook pays Timothy $50 to forge the signature of 20th-century American novelist John Dos Passos—ostensibly for a terminally ill friend. Timothy then begins regularly forging the signatures of dead authors for Pennybrook, treating himself to a fancy dinner and wine with the crisp $50 bills, which remind him of the $10 bills his grandmother used to send him on his birthday.
By Amor Towles
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