The rolling tables stacked with books that normally fill the floor at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, have been pushed to the walls. A brightly colored collection of worn wooden chairs has been arranged in rows and the podium set up. An enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowd has gathered for a group reading organized by Slice magazine.

Slice cofounder Celia Johnson introduces CJ Hauser, who is in town reading from her debut novel, The From-Aways (William Morrow, 2014); to be followed by Justin Taylor, visiting from New York; and finally, hometown heroes Douglas W. Milliken and Mira Ptacin.

Near the back of the room, Richard Russo takes in the scene and smiles his bright-eyed smile. In the shoulder-to-shoulder hubbub, many seem to have missed the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, who had walked the few blocks from his house and arrived early. While the evening’s organizers scurried about making final preparations, Russo grabbed small stacks of chairs and helped set them out. The gesture seemed quintessentially Russo: The humble, blue-collar kid from a hardscrabble mill town is still very much alive and thriving within the sixty-six-year-old award-winning author who has made stories of the haves and have-nots his life work.

Later, an audience member’s dog—perhaps overwhelmed by the room’s swelling mugginess or too many handouts of half-eaten cookies—trots up beside the podium while Hauser is mid-reading and promptly deposits a puddle of vomit on the carpet. The crowd erupts with startled laughter. It feels like a moment straight out of a Richard Russo novel.

Russo has lived in Maine since the early 1990s, when he arrived to teach at Colby College in Waterville. After retiring, he settled in Portland with Barbara, his wife of more than forty years; their adult daughters, Emily and Kate, live nearby. 

Ensconced in an overstuffed couch in the den of his handsome brick town house, circa-1817, Russo is relaxed as he discusses a publishing career begun more than thirty years ago. The phone has been ringing all morning but he is happy to discuss the arrival of Everybody’s Fool, published in May by Knopf, the much-anticipated sequel to his beloved 1993 novel, Nobody’s Fool (Random House). He laughs often, and infectiously, as he talks.

While friends, fellow writers, agents, editors, and booksellers frequently describe him as decent, generous, and hardworking, Russo has also become a statesman of American letters, the author of eight novels, two story collections, a stand-alone novella, a memoir, and more than half a dozen screenplays. He is revered for writing fiction set against the backdrop of declining mill towns while consistently drawing hilarity from his characters’ pathos; his wonderfully unhurried novels brim with wry humor and ruminative protagonists. Russo, called “the patron saint of small-town fiction” by the Washington Post, has embraced the sentimental, comic, and occasionally satirical even while riddling his novels with the anxieties of characters heaped in foibles and frailties, all of them struggling to understand what it is they want out of life.

Russo was born in 1949, the only child of a strong-willed, neurotically controlling mother and an absent, ne’er-do-well father. He was raised in upstate New York, in Gloversville, a town already on the wane from its former glory as the hub of America’s glove-making industry. Unlike other family members, Russo avoided a fate in the dank dye house or at the leather-cutting bench. After high school, he left home for far-away Tucson, where he spent years at the University of Arizona earning his bachelor’s degree, MFA, and, finally, a PhD in American literature. Little did he know when he fled Gloversville that he would spend a lifetime confronting it in his imagination, reckoning with it through the prism of fictional towns he called Mohawk, North Bath, Thomaston, and, most famously, Empire Falls.

As Russo put himself through school, during summers he returned to New York and worked in road construction alongside his father. The work would prove pivotal to Russo’s then-unimagined writing life, as he spent many after-work hours drinking in local bars with his father and getting to know the man who abandoned him and his mother. It is telling of Russo’s personal optimism and capacity for generosity that even his unreliable and unavailable father becomes an acceptably irascible rapscallion in his fiction, reimagined as Sully in Nobody’s Fool and as Sam Hall in The Risk Pool (Random House, 1988), whose memorable post-drunken-brawl emergency room philosophy is: “Things get bad. It’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

Or perhaps Russo’s grace on the page is also an expression of gratitude for the fact that things could have gone very differently in his life. “There is another Richard Russo who is still in Gloversville, sitting on a bar stool,” he once told a reporter for England’s Independent newspaper. “Someone very different. Someone angrier. Certainly not a writer. I doubt we would like each other very much.”

In Arizona, heading down the path to become a literary academic, Russo began writing in earnest. While many of his peers were rapt by the au courant experimentation of John Barth and William H. Gass, Russo fell under the influence of an older generation: He found inspiration in Charles Dickens’s large canvas, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of reinvention, and Mark Twain’s exploration of darkness via humor. Russo wrote his first novel while living in Arizona and set it there, in the desert. But the fiction fell flat.

“I was trying to pretend I belonged,” he says today. “But I hadn’t found either my subject or my voice, and I had a kind of tourist’s knowledge of Tucson.”

Russo’s writing professor, Robert C. S. Downs, pointed to a single “bright spot” in the novel: forty pages of backstory set in upstate New York. Russo resisted. “I remember thinking ‘This is even worse!’ because it meant that’s who I am. I was hoping I’d be able to reinvent myself. But I realized that the place I’d been running from for a decade since I’d gone to the University of Arizona and earned all of these degrees…well, it was like I’d tried to enter the witness protection program only to be recognized immediately,” he says with a chuckle. The novel manuscript went into a drawer, and Russo went on to new work.

More than a year later, after he’d taken his first teaching job at Penn State Altoona, Russo revisited those forty pages. “I realized that if I was willing to embrace the voice and the sensibility of those pages, I was, as a writer, kind of starting over,” he says. “And I realized at that time, too, that it was the thing to do.” He was reluctant, but it was impossible to resist: Russo was going home again. The forty pages became the core of his first published novel, Mohawk.

The phone rings. Russo excuses himself. A winter storm is predicted to begin pounding the East Coast in the next forty-eight hours, and someone from Knopf is calling to adjust airline tickets so Russo, his wife, and daughter Emily, can fly out for the American Booksellers Association’s annual Winter Institute. Russo relays some information and shuts off. The situation looks hopeful.

After writing a draft of Mohawk, Russo’s fate took a fortuitous turn when the literary agent Nat Sobel—who had worked for a decade at Grove Press before founding Sobel Weber Associates in the 1970s—read one of Russo’s short stories in the Mid-Atlantic Review. Impressed by the story, Sobel wrote and asked the young author if he was working on a novel. Russo returned the agent’s letter with a phone call. Even today, Sobel laughs when he recalls their awkward first conversation. Sobel said he’d like to read Russo’s novel manuscript—not yet titled Mohawk—and offer suggestions and edits. Russo bristled. “His very chilly response was, ‘You haven’t even read my novel and you already have edits?’” says Sobel. “I told him I haven’t read the manuscript of a first novel that didn’t need some work.” Russo mailed the manuscript.

Sobel read and admired the novel but had a major concern with one section. “I kind of dreaded letting Rick know I thought a highly dramatic moment near the end of the novel was confusing,” says Sobel. But he called Russo and stated his case. After an initially tense conversation, Russo rewrote the chapter.

“I didn’t really understand the chapter myself,” recalls Russo. “I was describing an event, but because I hadn’t thoroughly imagined it in my mind, I wasn’t going from true detail to true detail—I was kind of fudging it with flowery language to make up for what I hadn’t really thought through. And Nat called me on that!” he remembers with a laugh.

After more than a dozen rejections, Mohawk was accepted by then twentysomething wunderkind editor Gary Fisketjon, who had launched the industry-changing Random House imprint Vintage Contemporaries. The edgy imprint was just two years old but had already built buzz with the startling success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and was bringing new readers to then-underappreciated writers such as Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Thomas McGuane.

At a time when peers were writing bleaker realism, Russo staked out gentler turf as a more conventional but by no means old-fashioned chronicler of blue-collar malaise. “A shock of recognition is, generally speaking, not gradual but immediate,” says Fisketjon about his reaction to reading Mohawk. “It didn’t take me more than a handful of pages or so to say, ‘He really knows what he is doing.’”

As Fisketjon slowly edited the novel—he’s famously fastidious and edits perhaps five pages an hour with a green pen as he fills the margins with suggestions about punctuation, dialogue, and adjectives—he noticed Russo was artfully sliding between past and present tense in different chapters. “The whole notion of narrative momentum,” says Fisketjon, “is kind of like a boat in the water: In order to maneuver a boat you have to be going faster than the current or slower than the current—if you are going with the current, you’re going wherever the hell the current takes you—so that kind of speeding up and slowing down that Rick was doing, I thought, ‘This is brilliant!’”

Russo recalls Fisketjon immediately made a very memorable editing suggestion on the Mohawk manuscript: A single flashback, almost a hundred pages long, near the middle of the book was broken apart into multiple italicized sections and sprinkled throughout the story. “I wouldn’t have thought to do that, or known how to try it,” says Russo. “But of course not having that enormous chunk in the center was so much more aesthetically pleasing. It was the only time I had to learn that lesson!”

Mohawk was published in 1986 as a paperback original. While a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews snarkily remarked that the novel was “workmanlike writing for lovers of the well-atmosphered small-town saga with not a cliché unturned,” the New York Times called Russo’s writing “brisk, colorful and often witty. These qualities and the impressive scope of the novel bode well for Richard Russo’s future….” Today, Russo calls Mohawk his “most autobiographical novel.”

The first author to write a blurb for Mohawk was Howard Frank Mosher, renowned chronicler of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. “Mohawk took me right straight home to my small-town youth like no other book I’d ever read,” says Mosher. “It was immediately evident to me that when Rick wrote about small-town American life, he did so from the inside out. He evoked Mohawk and its run-down environs the way Faulkner evoked Yoknapatawpha County, writing with unsparing honesty and deep love about a highly specific place and the people who’d both shaped and been shaped by it.”

Thirty years later, Mosher’s esteem for Russo’s body of work has only grown. “No contemporary writer has given me as much reading pleasure as Rick,” he asserts. “I’d like to see him win the Nobel Prize.”           

Once Mohawk left his desk, Russo never stopped working. In fact, the summer before the novel’s autumn publication, he appeared alongside Ford, Robert Olmstead, Jayne Anne Phillips, Joy Williams, and others in Granta’s “More Dirt: The New American Fiction” issue, a sequel of sorts to Granta’s era-defining 1983 “Dirty Realism” issue. Russo’s story “Fishing With Wussy” would turn out to be the opening chapter of his second novel, The Risk Pool.

The phone rings. Russo walks to the kitchen. Bad news: His airline tickets have been changed but they’re not able to get his wife and daughter onto the same flight. They may have to book new tickets. “I knew this was gonna be a cluster from the moment the freezing rain started in North Carolina,” sighs Russo.

After the publication of Mohawk, Russo’s reputation and readership grew steadily with each new book during the next decade and a half: The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody’s Fool (1993), and Straight Man (1997), all published by Random House and edited by David Rosenthal, as Fisketjon had moved on to head up Atlantic Monthly Press. But it was Nobody’s Fool that made the boldest mark and quickly became his most successful novel to date. “The material in that book,” says Russo, “may be a little more ambitious, may be a little richer than my previous books. I think what all those earlier books have in common is their intimacy—you follow the characters in a fairly intimate way over a relatively short amount of time.”

The success of the 1995 film adaptation of Nobody’s Fool—for which Paul Newman received his final Best Actor Oscar nomination—allowed Russo to quit teaching and write full time, and Straight Man, his uproarious take on academia, arrived promptly in 1997. Soon after, for his fifth novel, Russo moved from Random House to Knopf to work with his original editor, Gary Fisketjon. Their first collaboration since 1986’s Mohawk would be Empire Falls (2001), the sweeping yet tender novel that would earn Russo a Pulitzer Prize. Written longhand at a table in a small deli on the Maine coast while locals and tourists ordered tuna melts and BLTs at the nearby counter, Empire Falls beat out Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days for the coveted award.

Russo recalls Empire Falls as a particularly difficult “night sweat of a book” to write. After spelunking into the confusing caverns of father-son relationships for previous novels, a father-daughter story became the novel’s emotional center. While a father of sons, he explains, often wonders, “What will they do?” Russo’s own daughters had entered high school, and he was wracked with the fear every father of daughters suffers: “What will be done to them?”

The novel quickly evolved into his most ambitious work, as he set the relationship of divorced diner-owner Miles Roby and his teenage daughter, Tick, against the larger historical and social context of Empire Falls: its boom from logging town to factory town under the leadership of the wealthy Whiting family, and then its sharp decline to a town on the edge.

“I think I understood in the undertaking that this was a new dimension to my work, and I think I understood that because it was so much more difficult,” says Russo. “Every time I worked at the history of Maine, of Empire Falls, of the Whiting family, I was coming up against the limits of my knowledge and my experience.”

The Acknowledgments page of Empire Falls personifies the glimmer of gratitude often seen in Russo’s smiling eyes. He thanks at length his younger daughter, Kate, for reminding him “by means of concrete details just how horrible high school can be, and how lucky we all are to escape more or less intact.” And he jokes that thanking Fistketjon at too much length would just create more prose for the editor and “he’s worked too hard already.”

The phone rings. In the kitchen, Barbara Russo is trying to cancel airline tickets and rebook new flights. But so is everyone else who needs to fly out of the northeast in the next forty-eight hours, and seats are disappearing quickly.

Russo followed Empire Falls with his first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, which Knopf published the next year, and then two novels, the brooding Bridge of Sighs (Knopf, 2007) and the satirical That Old Cape Magic (Knopf, 2009). The author himself summed up how the latter novel contrasted to the former in his 2012 memoir Elsewhere: “Compared with the book that preceded it—my darkest, written and revised during my mother’s long, final descent—this new novel was a breezy tale that seemed to suggest I was finding my way back to the cautious, hard-won optimism that characterizes my fiction.”

This assessment of his writing, says Russo, owes a great deal to his long association with director Robert Benton, who adapted Empire Falls for the screen and worked with the author on several other film projects. “He has always said that I am the most optimistic writer he knows…but I don’t think I am nearly as optimistic as he thinks I am,” chuckles Russo. Benton offers as evidence an important scene in Russo’s oeuvre: At the end of Empire Falls, Miles Roby’s glove box falls open (its broken latch has been a running gag) and he says to his disheveled, vagabond father, Max, that it’s broken and can’t be fixed. To that, Max replies, “Don’t be an idiot, anything can be fixed.”

Russo appreciates Benton’s assessment, but he’s skeptical. In fact, to briefly sum up his memoir Elsewhere, it is about confronting something that cannot be fixed: relationship with his obsessive-compulsive mother. “I spent all of my adolescence, the vast majority of my young adult life, and then into my life as a husband and a father, trying to fix something that could not be fixed by me,” says Russo. His account of their lifelong bond and her codependency is often harrowing: Where his fiction balances the comic and heartbreaking, the memoir is fraught with pain and a frustration bordering on anger. This is so often brushed against but avoided in his fiction but is explored, if not embraced, in his nonfiction.

Elsewhere is Russo’s book, but it is his mother’s story. He never took the obligation lightly. “The teller of the tale in a memoir has all the advantages,” says Russo. But writing the book was an exorcism of sorts. “We all understand that memory is tricky, and I think the trick to writing a good memoir is always having that in mind. And to not suggest more moral authority than is fair to the person you’re writing about.”

The phone is silent. But there is a knock at the front door. Kate, Russo’s younger daughter, arrives. She and her husband, Tom Butler, are both visual artists and met while studying at London’s acclaimed Slade School. They have dropped in to say goodbye: They are scheduled to leave in a few days to live abroad for several months. In 2012 the pair collaborated with Russo on Interventions (Down East Books), a print-only, slipcased collection of four chapbooks, designed by Butler, that feature a mix of Russo’s fiction and nonfiction with art by Kate.

Between novels, Russo remains busy working on screenplays, polishing scripts, and attending to other projects. In 2010 he edited the annual Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and unsurprisingly brought an infusion of humor to the series. In 2013 he published Nate in Venice, a digital-only novella, with Byliner.

Russo made himself even busier when he joined the Authors Guild about five years ago. His affiliation with the guild began with Amazon, when the Internet retailer released its Price Check app and encouraged readers to use independent bookstores as showrooms but make purchases online. Russo penned a scathing op-ed about the practice entitled “Amazon’s Jungle Logic” for the New York Times. Amazon’s move felt “bloody personal,” says Russo, whose older daughter, Emily, was an independent bookseller at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. In short order, Russo became the vice president of the Guild’s council and has regularly spoken publicly about the organization’s stance against what it calls Amazon’s predatory practices. His platform at the Authors Guild has allowed him to focus more on another area of interest too: emerging authors.

“If the Authors Guild is going to remain vital and urgent today,” says Russo, “in addition to things like protecting copyright, it has to be of more service to emerging authors, and that’s been my particular emphasis—so few of the advantages I had as an emerging author exist anymore.” His voice fills with awe and admiration when he mentions the talent of young writers he has read and supported in recent years, including Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, and Hannah Tinti.

“He really sets the bar higher than anybody I’ve ever come across, in terms of not only generosity of time but also a genuineness of interest,” says Fisketjon. “And he doesn’t just do shit because it’s the right thing to do, he does things because he’s actually interested.”

Indeed, Russo’s literary interests and tastes are wide-ranging: In 2001 he wrote the introduction for The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (Henry Holt), and late last year he turned in an introduction for Mark Twain’s Collected Nonfiction Vol. 2, due this autumn from the Everyman’s Library Classics & Contemporary Classics series. Lately he’s been savoring Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald (Arcade Publishing, 2015). He rarely misses the opportunity to recommend an overlooked noir writer such as James Crumley, or push Isak Dinesen’s oft-forgotten first U.S. publication, Seven Gothic Tales (Random House, 1934).            

Things have come full circle from the days when Russo the young debut novelist sought a blurb from Mosher. Now the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s own blurb is highly coveted. Out of necessity Russo has become very particular about whose books he blurbs: He will only consider work by emerging authors who don’t yet have a national reputation or an established audience.

When Russo edited the Best American Short Stories, he plucked Lori Ostlund’s “All Boy” from the New England Review. Long a fan of the series as well as a devoted reader of Russo, Ostlund was stunned. “When I learned that my story was going to appear in the series and that it had been chosen by Richard Russo,” she says, “it was as if two important parts of my reading-writing world had come together. It was thrilling.” The story would not only appear in Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor Award–winning The Bigness of the World (University of Georgia Press, 2009); in addition, the titular boy would become the protagonist of her debut novel, the big-hearted and hilarious After the Parade (Scribner, 2015). “When Scribner asked me for a blurber dream list, Rick was at the top,” says Ostlund.

“Later, I read his memoir,” she says, “in which he talks about the shelves of [advance reader’s copies] in his house that he didn’t have time to read or the heart to throw away. I remember reading that passage out loud to [my wife] Anne and thinking how lucky I was.”

The first chapter of Richard Russo’s much-anticipated Everybody’s Fool opens with a line that seems one-part Dickensian and one-part pure Russo: “Hilldale Cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a Colonial cart path.” 

The new novel is as much simply a return to the street and denizens of North Bath as it is an explicit sequel. Set ten years after the end of Nobody’s Fool, a septuagenarian Donald “Sully” Sullivan is back, and he’s still warring with Raymer, who has somewhat inexplicably become the town’s chief of police. Sully’s handyman sidekick Rub Squeers has been promoted to town gravedigger, his old boss Carl Roebuck is still nursing resentments, and even though the beloved Miss Beryl, Sully’s former landlady, is dead, she still plays a major part. 

But Everybody’s Fool is not simply a continuation of Nobody’s Fool. “I would not have written this book if it was just Sully’s story,” says Russo. The gnawing idea for the novel came into focus when Russo heard a real-life story he immediately imagined had fictional potential: A police chief believed his wife was having an affair after he discovered in her car a garage-door opener that wasn’t for their house. The chief would drive slowly around town clicking the opener, searching for the door it opened. “What if Raymer were that police chief?” thought Russo.

“As a comic premise it just fascinated me,” he says, “and I wanted to write about a guy who does this and who will come gradually to realize what a dangerous fool’s errand this is. It calls into question all kinds of interesting things about what we really know—what does he know about his wife, what does he know about himself and his own motivations, what does he know about the way the world works.  

“It’s an open door to all kinds of foolishness. And of course to write a book with the title Everybody’s Fool after writing a book called Nobody’s Fool was very attractive as well!”

Russo had begun Everybody’s Fool when the need to write Elsewhere overwhelmed him. He’d never stopped one book to write another before, but after purging his system with the memoir, he returned with a passion to the novel and worked harder than ever. For long stretches he wrote not only in the morning but returned to his desk in the afternoon for several more hours. He was overcome with joy to return to the cast of North Bath. “I think it’s my most entertaining book in a long time,” says Russo. “There are serious issues in it but it wears them lightly. I don’t want to—after Bridge of Sighs or Empire Falls—feel like every book of mine has to be more and more ambitious. I want to be a storyteller.”

When Sobel first finished reading the manuscript of Nobody’s Fool, he already hoped there would be a sequel. He called Russo and said, “You have to promise me this is not the last we’ll see of Sully!” Mosher, the first author to write a blurb for Russo, has openly hoped for the sequel for years. “For the last decade,” says Russo, “every time I see Howard, he asks what’s going on with Sully and Rub, as if they’re real and I’d know. I guess the book is an answer to his relentless queries.” Russo has dedicated Everybody’s Fool to his old pal.

The phone rings. Russo’s wife Barbara announces from the kitchen that they’ll all make it to Denver for the ABA’s Winter Institute, albeit on separate flights. “Oh, well,” says Russo. The morning has been something of a lesson straight out of the author’s fiction: In life, we don’t get out of trouble, but if we’re lucky we learn how to deal with it.

Russo says that, with the publication of each new novel, he still feels lucky. “My overall sense is that certain things come easier—insomuch as a little confidence that you’ve done something before can be a balm—but I’m slower now. I’m much more meticulous in the early stages than I was as a younger writer, much more attuned to language, much less willing to let go of sloppy sentences by saying I’ll fix them later. I have to work longer and harder now to get less. I’m also much crankier and harder to please,” he says with a laugh. “Everything about the world now puts a premium on speed, and something seems wrong about that to me.”

While the changes in his writing life and routines seem inevitable, his friends say Russo hasn’t changed in a few important ways. “I’ve often thought in all these years since I first met Rick,” says Fisketjon, “that he is now what he was then: the same generous, heart-in-the-right-place, very well-read, very hardworking guy. Success and renown hasn’t changed him one iota.”

Russo’s own cautious, hard-won optimism has paid dividends over the decades. “One reason I’m not more pessimistic,” he says, laughter rising in his voice, “is that it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

Joshua Bodwell is the executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. His profiles for Poets & Writers Magazine have included Ann Beattie, John Casey, Andre Dubus III, and Richard Ford. He was recently awarded the 2015 Marianne Russo Award for emerging authors from the Key West Literary Seminar.