Several weeks later, he received a letter from Harrison Salisbury, then managing editor of The New York Times, who had found the bottle.

[5] He graduated from Yale College and received a Master of Arts degree in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow.

[8][9] When Towles was a young man, he credited Peter Matthiessen, nature writer, novelist, and one of the founders of The Paris Review, as the primary inspiration for writing novels.

[11] His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for 59 weeks,[12] was a finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

[6] Towles resides in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, New York City, with his wife Maggie, their son Stokley, and their daughter Esmé.