Book Basics - Meet the Author - Other Information - Discuss the Book
Although critics have questioned the literary devices used in Specimen Days and even whether the book can be called a novel, no one has questioned the brilliance of its author, Michael Cunningham.
The Cincinnati native sealed his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writers of our time with his sixth book, the successor to the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Hours. Specimen Days has been called “exciting, fresh and important” (Salon), “captivating, strange and extravagant” (Publisher’s Weekly) and “masterful and delicate … with deep themes and elegant writing” (National Public Radio).
Cunningham was born Nov. 6, 1952, in Cincinnati. Early on, his family moved to La Canada, Calif., where Cunningham grew up. He remained in California to earn a degree in English literature from Stanford University, then enrolled in the vaunted Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing.
Cunningham has won many prestigious awards. In addition to the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award, both for The Hours, he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award (1995), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988), and a University of Iowa Michener Fellowship (1982). The Hours was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman.
Cunningham teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. His only nonfiction work, a travel book, is about Provincetown, where he and his partner own a home. They also have a residence in New York City.
Cunningham, who is gay but has said he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “gay writer,” commented in an interview on planetout.com, “I don’t know if I would say that I don’t consider myself a ‘gay writer.’ I hope I never put it in just exactly those terms. I consider myself a gay man who writes, and it matters about as much and as little that I’m a white man, an American, a member of the upper-middle class. All these things have a huge effect on what I write, but they’re not the overriding, distinguishing characteristic.”
More on Michael Cunningham
New Yorker Michael Cunningham has won many prestigious awards. In addition to the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award, both for The Hours, he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award (1995), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988), and a University of Iowa Michener Fellowship (1982).
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Listen to Michael Cunningham talk about Specimen Days and access audio, video and printed interviews with the author through this link to his Web site: http://www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com/resources/
