Michael Cunningham: April and May Portrait of the Month

Michael Cunningham, New York, NY, 1991

American writer Michael Cunningham was born in 1952 in Cincinnati, OH, and raised in Pasadena, CA. He studied English literature at Stanford University, graduating in 1975, and at the University of Iowa, where he received a Michener Fellowship and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1980. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cunningham published several short stories in the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker. His early novel, Golden States, was published in 1984. Cunningham’s next book, A Home at the End of the World (1990), established his reputation and brought him critical praise. In this work, the author explored themes common to his later novels, including situations dealing with traditional and extended families, the impact of AIDS, and a look at gay culture within the larger context of contemporary society. Published in 1995, Flesh and Blood, about the lives and relationships of several generations of a Greek-American family, received the Whiting Writers’ Award. Cunningham is best known for his 1999 novel, The Hours, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Award and won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Library Association’s book award for gay and lesbian literature. The Hours focuses on the lives of three women from different time periods, whose narratives are compellingly intertwined. The title is a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf herself is a main character in Cunningham’s story. A film version of The Hours was released in 2002; it was directed by Stephen Daldry and starred Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. In 2002, Cunningham wrote his non-fiction work, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, the writer’s portrait of the famed gay resort town. His novels Specimen Days and By Nightfall were published to critical acclaim in 2005 and 2010 respectively. Cunningham has received numerous awards throughout his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1998. He has taught at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, and in the creative writing MFA program at Brooklyn College. He is currently a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University. His new novel, The Snow Queen, comes out in May 2014.