Lorrie Moore

For the journalist, please see Lori Moore

Lorrie Moore (born Marie Lorena Moore on January 13, 1957) is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories.

Biography

Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.

In 1980, Moore enrolled in Cornell University's M.F.A. program, where she was taught by Alison Lurie. Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact agent Melanie Jackson. Jackson sold her collection, Self-Help, composed almost entirely of stories from her master's thesis, to Knopf in 1983.

Themes

Moore writes frequently about failing relationships and terminal illness and is known for her mordant wit and pithy one-liners. Her stories often take place in the Midwest.

Works

Short stories

Her short story collections are Self-Help, Like Life, and the New York Times bestseller Birds of America. She has contributed to The Paris Review. Her first story to appear in The New Yorker, "You're Ugly, Too," was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Another story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," also published in The New Yorker, was reprinted in the 1998 edition of the annual collection The Best American Short Stories; the tale of a young child falling sick, the piece was loosely paterned on events in Moore's own life. The story was also included in the 2005 anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, edited by David Sedaris.

Moore's Collected Stories was published by Faber in the UK in May 2008. It included selections from each of her previously published collections, excerpts from her novel Anagrams, and three previously uncollected stories first published in The New Yorker.

Novels

Moore's novels are Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), and A Gate at the Stairs (2009). Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is the story of a woman vacationing with her husband who recalls an intense friendship from her adolescence. A Gate at the Stairs takes place just after the September 11 attack and is about a twenty-year-old Midwestern woman's coming of age.

Children's books

Moore has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper, about an elf whom Santa mistakenly leaves behind at the home of the worst child on his "good" list. The elf must help the child be good for the coming year so Santa will return next Christmas.

Awards

Moore won the 1998 O. Henry Award for her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," published in The New Yorker on January 27, 1997. In 1999, Moore was named as the winner of the The Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Birds of America.^[2] In 2004, she was selected as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006, and is a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.^[3] In 2008, she delivered Oxford University's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. Her 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and for the Orange Prize.^[4]

Academic career

Moore is the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she teaches creative writing. She joined the faculty in 1984.^[5] She has also taught at Cornell University, as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, and at the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan.^[6][7][8]

Personal life

Moore was profiled in the September 2009 Reader's Digest about her current readings (Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro), her Internet usage (Wikipedia), her listenings (Al Green, Joni Mitchell, and Tuck & Patti), and her television habits (Mark Shields, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart. Eugene Robinson, and Rachel Maddow).^[9]

Bibliography

Short stories

• (1985) Self Help; ISBN 0-446-67192-4
• (1990) Like Life; ISBN 0-375-71916-4
• (1998) Birds of America; ISBN 0-312-24122-4
• (2008) The Collected Stories; ISBN 978-0-571-23934-4

Novels

• (1986) Anagrams; ISBN 0-307-27728-3
• (1994) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?; ISBN 1-4000-3382-9
• (2009) A Gate at the Stairs ISBN 978-0-375-40928-8

Children's books

• (1987) The Forgotten Helper; ISBN 0-440-41680-9

References

External links

• University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty profile
• "About Lorrie Moore: A Profile" Ploughshares (Fall 1998)
• Salon interview (1998)
• Elizabeth Gaffney (Spring-Summer 2001). "Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/the-art-of-fiction-no-167-lorrie-moore. 
• The Believer interview (2005)
• Interview with Lorrie Moore, Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show (October 2009)
• Interview for KCRW's Bookworm (22 October 2009)
• “Words, Wit, & Wild Hearts: A Conversation with Author Lorrie Moore”, On Wisconsin (Spring 2010)
• Moore book reviews at The New York Review of Books
• Archive of Moore's writings for The New Yorker.