Profile of Michael Cunningham on Famous Like Me

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an award-winning American writer/novelist, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours.

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 Bachelor of Arts degree. Later at the University of Iowa he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.

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 at Brooklyn College.

Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered for more than a decade, he dislikes being referred to as only a "gay writer", according to a PlanetOut article because while being gay does greatly influence his work, he feels that it is not (and shouldn't be) his defining characteristic.

Works

• Golden States (1984)
• White Angel (1989)
• A Home at the End of the World (1990)
• Flesh and Blood (1995)
• Kindred (1995)
• The Hours (1998)
• Land's End: A Walk through Provincetown (2002) (Non-fiction)
• Specimen Days (2005)

Both The Hours and A Home At the End Of the World have been adapted for the screen (the former in 2002 and the latter in 2004).

Awards and achievements

His short story White Angel was included in the 1989 Best American Short Stories.

For The Hours, Cunningham was awarded the:

• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• PEN/Faulkner Award
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award

all in 1999.

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