Philipp Meyer’s first novel, American Rust (2009), depicts a community in small-town Pennsylvania, which formerly served as a thriving industrial hub. This work established Meyer’s interest in chronicling the working and middle classes, particularly how people on the ground of large industrial movements enter their chosen fields with the promise of prosperity but suffer in the long run. Meyer’s second novel, The Son, refocuses this lens on the plight of Indigenous and Latinx communities in the Southwest United States, showing how cattle and oil booms forced them out of their historical territories while also affecting the land in irreversible ways.

Meyer wrote most of his debut novel while he was a student fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Texas, which is also where he first developed the ideas for his second novel, The Son. During a class on Southwest American literature, Meyer learned about the Bandit Wars, waged along the southern United States border between 1915 and 1918. Realizing that these events hold a small space in the cultural consciousness of the US, Meyer sought to shed light on this history in his novel. The wars became the basis for Peter McCullough’s storyline, in which the massacre of the Garcia family kicks off a series of killings targeted at the Mexican American or Tejano community.