Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an
award-winning American writer, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.
Life and career
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at
Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later at the University of Iowa he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers'
Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic
Monthly and the Paris Review. His story "White Angel," from his novel
A Home at the End of the World was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989," published by Houghton Mifflin.
In 1993 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham teaches at the Fine
Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing MFA program at Brooklyn College.
Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered for 18 years, he dislikes being referred to as
only a "gay writer", according to a PlanetOut
article[1] because while being gay does greatly influence
his work, he feels that it is not (and should not be) his defining characteristic.
Although The Hours established Cunningham as a major force in American writing, his most recent novel,
Specimen Days, was not well received by American critics.[citation needed] Cunningham has edited a book of
poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Laws for Creations, and has co-written, with Susan
Minot, a screenplay adapted from Minot's novel Evening. He is also a producer for the 2007 film, which stars Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep.
Bibliography
Cunningham reading at a
W. H. Auden tribute in New York.
Novels
Nonfiction
- 2002 Lands End: A Walk in Provincetown
Screenplays
- 2004 A Home at the End of the World
- 2007 Evening
Contributor
- 2000 Drawn By The Sea (exhibition catalogue text; 110 signed
copies)
- 2001 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
(Modern Library Classics edition) (Introduction)
- 2001 I Am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess (Text)
- 2004 Washington Square by Henry
James (Signet Classics edition) (Afterword)
- 2004 Death In Venice by Thomas Mann (new
translation by Michael Henry Heim) (Introduction)
- 2006 Laws for Creations, Poems by Walt Whitman (Editor and introduction)
Awards and achievements
- "White Angel" was included in the 1989 Best American Short Stories.
- "Mr. Brother" was included in the 1999 O. Henry Prize Stories.
For The Hours, Cunningham was awarded the:
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - 1999
- PEN/Faulkner Award - 1999
- Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award - 1999
References
External links
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