Associate Professor
mbyers@umich.eduOffice Information:
3163 Angell Hall
hours: Wednesday 1-2:30
Writing of Fiction; Graduate Faculty; English; MFA Faculty; Twentieth Century American; Twentieth Century British; American; British
Education/Degree:
M.F.A., University of Michigan 1996Highlighted Work and Publications

Percival's Planet
Michael Byers
A novel of ambition and obsession centered on the race to discover Pluto in 1930, pitting an untrained Kansas farm boy against the greatest minds of Harvard at the run-down Lowell Observatory in ArizonaIn 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs ... See More