This
is the thirty-ninth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Cunningham, Michael (b. 1952)
The acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham examines gay culture within the context of the larger society.
Cunningham
was born in Ohio in 1952. A graduate of Stanford University (1975) and
the University of Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), he also studied under a
fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
where he has continued to teach; he is also a member of the faculty at
Columbia University.

In
the 1970s and 1980s Cunningham published several short stories in the
Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and New Yorker. An early novel, Golden
States (1984), although generally well reviewed, is today dismissed by
the author. Cunningham's next book, A Home at the End of the World
(1990), established his reputation. It received critical praise for its
style, complex characterizations, and skillful examination of
contemporary mores.
In this novel Cunningham explores themes common
to his later works as well: traditional and extended-family situations,
the impact of AIDS, and the examination of gay culture within the
context of the larger society. A Home at the End of the World was
short-listed for several awards, including the Irish Times International
Fiction Prize.

Flesh
and Blood (1995), a saga exploring the lives and relationships of
several generations of a Greek-American family, received the Whiting
Writers' Award. An ambitious and wide-ranging book, it earned a great
deal of critical recognition and was praised for its reach and the
elegant prose that is characteristic of all of Cunningham's writing.

Cunningham's
next novel, The Hours (1999), greatly enhanced his reputation.
Nominated for the National Book Critics Award, the book eventually won
the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Library
Association's book award for gay and lesbian literature.

The
Hours is Cunningham's most complex and fully realized novel to date,
illustrating a brilliant use of point of view and a sophisticated
handling of structure. In alternating chapters, the reader is taken
through a single day in the lives of three women from different time
periods. By the end of the novel, themes and characters are interwoven
with stunning effect. Named after the working title of Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours is an homage to that work; Woolf herself is a
principal character in a moving and beautifully realized depiction of
her last days.

In numerous
interviews over the past several years, Cunningham has stated that
although being gay himself and concerned in all his novels with gay
characters and themes, he would not label himself a "gay novelist." His
books are in fact notable for the presentation of "gayness" as a given
and for embedding gay issues within the context of contemporary society
as a whole.

As Michael Coffey
has observed, "In The Hours, [Cunningham] writes about straights and
gays and lesbians and teenagers and housewives and a great figure of
Western literature--and, deftly, brings them all together in a tale
about love accommodating difference." With the extraordinary critical
and popular success of The Hours--the novel spent several weeks on
American and British best-seller lists--Cunningham's writing is indeed
enjoying wide readership.
"The success of Stephen Daldry's 2002 film
version of The Hours, featuring Julianne Moore, Nichole Kidman, and
Meryl Streep, has brought Cunningham's novel even more attention and new
readers.
Cunningham is also the author of Land's End: A Walk through
Provincetown (2002), an evocative and loving portrait of the resort,
which has long been a mecca for gay men and lesbians, as well as for
artists and writers of all sexualities. Explaining Provincetown's
attraction, he describes the community as "one of the places in the
world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the
New Orleans of the north."
David Garnes