Twenty years ago, Stewart O’Nan, M.F.A. ’92, left a potentially lucrative career — as a structural engineer for the aerospace industry — to be a writer. He entered Cornell’s M.F.A. program in fiction and has since become one of the Creative Writing Program’s most commercially successful authors, with several best-selling fiction and nonfiction books.

Engineering gave him an appreciation for precision and a stylistic approach to his craft, he said at a Feb. 4 Literary Luncheon at the home of Professor Robin Davisson and President David Skorton.

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