“Love is deep, a mystery –who wants to understand its every particular?” (143).
An homage to Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham’s fourth novel The Hours (which won a string accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1999) was initially intended to be a more modern version of Mrs. Dalloway with the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic serving as a key theme. Over time, the novel took on further dimensions such that The Hours offers a unique examination into the lives of three different women living in separate historical eras, conveying each of their lives through a single day’s journey: one is a listless 1940s Los Angeles suburban housewife, another is a 1990s woman in the West Village named Clarissa (the same name of the protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway), and the third is none other than Virginia Woolf, herself, as she mulls over writing her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Needless, to say there are lots of interesting parallels between the lives of these three different women, in spite of their distance from one another across time and place.
The Hours opens with a morbid prologue: Virginia Woolf rushes out of her house with a stone in her pocket as she wades down into the Ouse River and drowns herself in 1941. For those unfamiliar with the life of Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham tenderly explores her fragile mental state in The Hours, a state which modern psychologists suggest may have been akin to bipolar disorder or manic depression. Following her mother’s death when she was a thirteen-year-old, Woolf’s father and brother also died shortly thereafter (along with her half-sister). These tragedies exacerbated her mental illness and required significant psychiatric care for much of her life. She tried to kill herself several times while suffering from severe physical ailments, including headaches, some of which lasted for days or even months at a time, as well as bouts of unbearable depression. In The Hours, the character of Virginia Woolf describes hearing voices in her head and seeing blinding flashes of light in conjunction with her headaches.
For the bulk of Virginia Woolf’s sections of the novel, the novel flashes back nearly twenty years before her suicide to a single day in 1923 where we find her wrestling with the writing of Mrs. Dalloway (which had the initial working title of “The Hours”). As the day begins, she tells herself: “this morning she may penetrate the obfuscation.” Living in the countryside of Richmond (which Virginia has grown to despise), she is watched over by her husband Leonard, housekeeper Nelly, and she is visited by her sister Vanessa Bell and her three children. During the day, Virginia and the kids find a bird in the garden that has died and they give it a proper grass burial. This moment provides an opportunity for Cunningham to explore Virginia Woolf’s outlook on life and her morbid fascination with the subject of death. There is also a striking moment in which Virginia secretly leans in and kisses her sister in a slightly more than platonic way (this ‘not so innocent’ kiss becomes the inspiration for a kiss Clarissa Dalloway later shares in Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway). It is described as an incredibly life-affirming moment for Virginia, which is perhaps slightly unnerving. Also in these chapters, Virginia decides against having Clarissa Dalloway commit suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Instead, she decides someone else will die, a character who is “a deranged poet, a visionary.” After Vanessa leaves, Virginia wanders down to the train station and very nearly escapes and flees back to her beloved London but she soon returns home with Leonard and they make plans to eventually move back to London. The strong indication here is that Virginia Woolf feels isolated and trapped in the countryside.
Then in the second set of chapters, we meet Laura Brown, a struggling suburban housewife living in Los Angeles in 1949. She is pregnant and has a three-year-old boy named Richie. She is an introverted bookworm, a “solitary girl” and “incessant reader” who yearns for nothing more than quietude and space so she can read books. At present, she is reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (“It is so beautiful; it is so much more than… well, than almost anything, really”). Throughout these chapters, Laura struggles as she bakes a birthday cake for her husband, Dan, intended for a celebration that night. The first cake she bakes falls short of her lofty expectations so she simply tosses it out and starts all over again. Laura seeks nothing short of perfection and the cake becomes a depressing symbol for her, a metaphor for the rigid conformist culture in the United States that once placed herculean expectations on suburban housewives, expecting them to maintain clean orderly homes, care for well-behaved children, maintain happy marriages, and demonstrate flawless culinary skills. As noted about Laura Brown: “she wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table” (101).
“The cake is less than she’d hoped it would be. She tries not to mind. It is only a cake, she tells herself. It is only a cake… There’s nothing really wrong with it, but she’d imagined something more. She’d imagined it larger, more remarkable. She’d hoped (she admits to herself) it would look more lush and beautiful, more wonderful” (99).
Laura feels inadequate in many respects, partly because her husband Dan is a celebrated war hero, but she sees herself as little more than an awkward introvert who is actually three years his senior. And also, she is simply unhappy throughout her days of mothering her three-year-old son Richie: “When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an affectionate maternal offhandedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would act” (47).
A popular gregarious neighbor named Kitty drops by Laura’s house for a conversation where Kitty reveals she has a cancerous growth on her uterus and it is apparently preventing her from having a child. In an act of sympathy, before Kitty leaves Laura kisses her on the mouth (a mirror of the scene wherein Virginia kissed her sister Vanessa on the mouth). Once again, the kiss serves as an unfamiliar transgressive moment that nevertheless feels life-affirming for Laura. Deep down, she longs to feel alive again. She tells herself she won’t be morbid like Virginia Woolf but that doesn’t stop her from spontaneously dropping off Richie with a babysitter so she can privately flee to a hotel room for a few hours and read to herself in peace. In these sections of the novel, we are treated to full-length passages quoted from Mrs. Dalloway, each of which help set the scene for Laura as she contemplates suicide. She wonders if suicide could feel freeing, releasing herself in an artful way in which she might unburden herself of the emptiness she feels.
Since publishing The Hours, Michael Cunningham has described Laura as the hardest character for him to capture. She is the closest to a cliché –a miserable housewife obsessed with the perfect house; an artist trapped in the life of a mother. Cunningham said Laura is closely based on the life of his own mother, a fact which she apparently picked up on when reading the novel. And when The Hours was later in production as a Hollywood movie, Cunningham’s mother was dying of cancer so the studio sent a a brief half hour or so of footage to Cunningham so his mother could see at least a few scenes about a week or so before she died, granting her the rare opportunity to watch herself “reincarnated” onscreen by Julianne Moore.
Lastly, the third set of chapters show a day in the life of Clarissa Vaughan, a middle-aged book editor living in New York City (West 10th Street in Greenwich Village) at the end of the twentieth century. She describes herself as an “ordinary person” because “she is fifty-two, just fifty-two, and in almost unnaturally good health.” She spends her day planning a party for her close friend and former troubled lover Richard, “an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters” who has just won the illustrious Carrouthers Prize. And what is the Carrouthers Prize? It is an esteemed literary prize for his body of poetry (funnily enough, one character named Barbara, a flower shop lady, amusingly compares the Carrouthers Prize to the Pulitzer Prize in the novel: “they simply award it when they become aware of someone whose career seems undeniably significant.” Little did Cunningham know he would soon win the Pulitzer Prize!) At any rate, during their somewhat tumultuous romantic relationship decades earlier, Richard had nicknamed Clarissa “Mrs. Dalloway,” even though she actually preferred a different literary nickname, perhaps either Isabel Archer (from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady) or Anna Karenina (from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina). Needless to say, the romantic relationship between Clarissa and Richard ended in a dispute on a street corner amidst an affair Richard had with a man named Louis Waters. All of this is explored in Clarissa’s scattered memories.
At any rate, Clarissa bustles around the city preparing for the party (buying flowers and bumping into old friends) and we learn that Clarissa lives with her longtime partner, Sally, and their relationship seems to have grown somewhat stagnant. All the while, Clarissa wrestles back and forth with what could have been had she stayed with Richard all those years ago. She her nostalgic memory of a kiss at dusk with Richard and their subsequent pond walk which she remembers as a moment of true “happiness.”
“Couldn’t they have discovered something… larger and stranger than what they’ve got? It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself” (97).
Among the many people she sees before the party one of them is actually Louis Waters, the man who was once part of the unusual love triangle relationship between Clarissa, Richard, and Louis all those years ago. But Louis also eventually left Richard at a train station in Rome over an argument about a letter Clarissa had sent to Richard. Like Clarissa, Louis now also wonders what might have happened had he stayed with Richard. But presently, he has been away for five years teaching in San Francisco where he has fallen in love with a student, though he longs to return to New York City.
We also learn that Clarissa has a teenage daughter named Julia (the identity of the father is never revealed –could it be Richard?) And tragically we learn that Richard is very sick; he is suffering from AIDS and the disease has developed into leukemia. Now he is mostly wheelchair-bound and confined to his room where he is slowly dying. Clarissa notes that he “may be a great artist and may not survive the year.” Despite their break-up many years earlier, and Clarissa’s current relationship with Sally, Richard “has always been Clarissa’s most rigorous, infuriating companion, her best friend” (19).
As the novel comes to a conclusion, Clarissa finally arrives at Richard’s apartment before the party, but she is alarmed to find him half-hanging out his five-story window. He says he finally feels free after having taken Xanax and Ritalin earlier in the morning. He seems morbid but unbothered. He addresses Clarissa one final time which helps to explain the title of the novel:
“I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that… But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick” (197-198).
He turns to Clarissa and tells her that he loves her, quoting Virginia Woolf’s suicide note: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been.” Then he silently and happily tumbles out the open window, crashing down onto the dirty street below which is covered in broken glass. No one saw or heard him fall.
And, lastly, the surprising plot twist comes at the end (spoiler alert) when we learn that Richard’s full name is, in fact, Richard Worthington Brown. Richard is one and the same with the little baby boy “Richie” who was being raised by Laura Brown in the earlier chapters. Indeed, an elderly Laura Brown (a retired librarian from Toronto) also makes an appearance at the end of the novel. She meets with Clarissa as they reflect on the extraordinary life of Richard as well as the troubled life of Laura, who is described as a lost mother, a woman who once attempted suicide, whose husband died of liver cancer, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver, and whose son has now died of suicide. It is a harrowing end to The Hours as people’s lives are shown to mirror each other, as well as the literature they are exposed to, in unique ways.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999, The Hours became a blockbuster hit and cultural phenomenon, rising to the top of the bestseller lists and eventually inspiring an Oscar-winning film in 2002 and later a staged opera in 2022. To this day, The Hours continues to enjoy a remarkable amount of popular success and praise.
But is The Hours truly a great work of American literature on par with other celebrated Pulitzer winners like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Wharton? Or, on the flipside, is it simply a derivative work or pastiche? In Mel Gussow’s April 1999 review of the novel in The New York Times (entitled “A Writer Haunted by Virginia Woolf”), he dubbed The Hours an “impressionistic response to ‘Mrs. Dalloway’” and in many ways I have to agree with this assessment. The Hours is a fond tribute to one of the great writers of the twentieth century, responding to the brilliance of Mrs. Dalloway in unique ways (I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) but I remain skeptical about The Hours. Perhaps I’m too curmudgeonly, but I don’t see how it rises anywhere beyond the realm of commercial popular literary fiction. This is not to deny The Hours as a successful homage; indeed, it is an extraordinary undertaking. But does it rise to the ranks of an American classic? Perhaps not. Cunningham’s prose deserve praise for poignantly capturing Virginia Woolf’s modernist stream-of-consciousness style as well as her ability to explore the depth and profundity of seemingly ordinary experiences, however I have always been a bit wary of our present wave of modern “literary reimaginings” which have captured the minds of critics and writers alike (other Pulitzer winners in this vein might include Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and James by Percival Everett).
I first read The Hours in college in a course that leaned heavily into its feminist themes as well as its deep exploration of the harrowing act of suicide. In The Hours, life seems almost unbearable for many of the characters. They are often torn between moments of incredible beauty and tragedy, and many yearn for freedom and escapism –from disease, loveless relationships, parenthood, mental illness, suburbia, and so on. Life is tragic, fragile, and weighty. And each seemingly mundane moment carries with it the pregnant potential of boundless richness. For his efforts to capture this immense complexity, Michael Cunningham is deserving of praise. And if he encourages more people to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway so much the better.
Notable Quotations:
“She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun” (opening lines, Virginia Woolf leaving her house to commit suicide).
“She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric” (4, Virginia Woolf’s inner monologue).
“For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal” (5, Virginia Woolf’s suicide).
“She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats heavily through shafts of brown, granular light. She does not travel far” (7, Virginia Woolf’s suicide).
“New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more” (9-10, Clarissa in New York City).
“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run” (10, Clarissa in New York City).
“She is fifty-two, just fifty-two, and in almost unnaturally good health” (10, Clarissa).
“What is wrong with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more. She loves West Tenth Street on an ordinary summer morning” (11, Clarissa).
“It’s the city’s crush and heave that move you; it’s intricacy; it’s endless life” (14, Clarissa in New York City).
“Virginia moves through the park without quite walking; she floats through it, a feather of perception, unbodied” (30).
“She stands tall, haggard, marvelous in her housecoat, the coffee steaming in her hand. He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries. He believes this more ardently than does anyone else. And she is his wife. She is Virginia Stephen, pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt or a Velazquez, appearing twenty years ago at her brother’s rooms in Cambridge in a white dress, and she is Virginia Woolf, standing before him right now. She has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin. She’s grown craggy and worn. She’s begun to look as if she’s carved from very porous, gray-white marble. She’s still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful” (33, Leonard reflecting on his wife, Virginia Woolf).
“How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that –who was able to feel contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself? What in the world is wrong with people?” (41, Laura reflecting on Virginia Woolf).
“Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for the reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence” (60, on Clarissa’s dying friend Richard).
“But can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?” (69, Virginia Woolf on writing her novel).
“It seems she will be fine. She will not lose hope. She will not mourn her lost possibilities, her unexplored talents (what if she has no talents, after all?). She will remain devoted to her son, her husband, her home and duties, all her gifts. She will want this second child” (79, Laura Brown reflecting somberly on her station in life).
“Couldn’t they have discovered something… larger and stranger than what they’ve got? It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself… Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That’s who I was. That’s who I am –a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port” (97, Clarissa pondering the life she could have made with Richard).
“…she wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table” (101, Laura on her desire to be a picturesque housewife).
“Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism. He was simply too good, too kind, too earnest, too sweet-smelling not to marry” (106, Laura on her marriage).
“Clarissa, she thinks, is not the bride of death after all. Clarissa is the bed in which the bride is laid” (121, Virginia reflecting on her character Clarissa).
“But now, right now, she is going somewhere (where?) to be alone, to be free of her child, her house, the small party she will give tonight” (142, Laura driving away from her life).
“Love is deep, a mystery –who wants to understand its every particular?” (143).
“It could, she thinks, be deeply comforting; it might feel so free: to simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it, like an ice field or a desert in early morning. She could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind –her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody—in this battered world (it will never be whole again, it will never be quite clean), saying to one another and to anyone who asks, We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea” (151-152, Laura contemplating suicide).
“They are present, right now, and they have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough” (185, on the relationship of Sally and Clarissa).
“I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that… But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick” (197-198, Richard reflecting on the struggles of living).
“Clarissa thinks of Richard on the windowsill; Richard letting go; not jumping, really, but sliding as if from a rock into water. What must it have been like, the moment he had irrevocably done it; the moment he was out of his dark apartment and released into air? What must it have been like to see the alley below, with its blue and brown garbage cans, its spray of amber glass, come rushing up? Was it –could it possibly have been—a pleasure of some kind to crumple onto the pavement and feel (did he momentarily feel?) the skull crack open, all its impulses, its little lights, spilled out?” (223, Clarissa imaging what it must have felt like for Richard to die).
“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep –it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more” (225, some closing reflections from Clarissa).
The 1998 Pulitzer Prize Decision:
The 1999 Pulitzer Fiction jury consisted of two returning judges (Richard Eder and Diane Johnson) as well as a prior Pulitzer Prize-winner (Oscar Hijuelos).
- Chair: Richard Eder (1932-2014) was an American film reviewer and drama critic who spent nearly three decades working for The New York Times in various roles, including as foreign correspondent in Latin America, film reviewer, and the drama critic. In later life, he was a book critic for The Los Angeles Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the National Book Critics Circle annual citation for an entry consisting of reviews of John Updike’s Roger’s Version, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Robert Stone’s Children of Light. He died in 2014 at the age of 82 of pneumonia as a result of post-polio syndrome, a childhood disease he contracted before the advent of the polio vaccine).
- Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) was the author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. Click here for my full review and biography.
- Diane Johnson (1934-present) is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France (she also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1980 film The Shining together with Stanley Kubrick). She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988 (also, Alison Lurie dedicated her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs to Diane Johnson).
In 1999, the other two nominees aside from The Hours were: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks (Russell Banks was previously a Pulitzer nominee in the fiction category in 1986) and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Barbara Kingsolver later won the Pulitzer for her novel Demon Copperhead in 2023 during a highly unusual year in which there were two winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the other winner was Trust by Hernan Diaz). The 1999 jury report (submitted to Pulitzer Administrator Seymour Topping on December 31, 1998) offered half page assessments of each of the three nominees. Notably, unlike in past years, each write-up in the jury report appears to have been written in different typeface (in other words, perhaps each judge was given the opportunity to write their own analysis for one of the finalists). The jury’s commentary on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours was as follows:
“Three contemporary American characters re-voice the patterns of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ (A fourth character is Woolf herself). It is not a literary pastiche but a vital transplanting: beautifully written, kaleidoscope work whose four-person complexity affects us with lyrical directness… Cunningham presents the floating post-modern world and generation that a number of contemporary writers have tackled, but non (sic?) so artfully and movingly. Unlike others, he eschews the familiar recourses to irony and distance. Instead, he anchors the floating to pre-modern caissons of love, grief and transcendent longing… He has simultaneously affirmed and dissolved the category of ‘gay’ novel with a book that is simply one particular door into universal faction.”
As always, the Pulitzer Board’s final selection of The Hours remains a mystery, though I remain eternally curious about its internal deliberations. At the time that the Pulitzer announcement was made in 1999, The Hours was considered something of a surprise winner (in fact, no one was more surprised than Michael Cunningham). According to a new The New York Times article at the time, Cunningham was convinced that Russell Banks would win for his “wonderful book, a sprawling American historical saga that was squarely in the Pulitzer tradition.” Cunningham wondered what chance his “dark, odd book” could actually have to win the prize. But on the afternoon that the Pulitzers were announced, Cunningham had left his apartment near Union Square in Manhattan to have lunch with two friends. About five minutes after 3pm, he checked his phone messages. The first was from a reporter, the second was from Jonathan Galassi, his editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, both of them were offering their congratulations to him for winning the Pulitzer Prize! It was then that Michael Cunningham started to cry and share a special moment with friends. Two days later, a congratulatory letter from the Pulitzer committee was sent to him by his publisher. The Hours was to become one of the few gay-themed novels to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (others arguably might include The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides). When asked about his win later in life, Cunningham has crassly joked that with the publication of The Hours, he had finally written a book that was devoid of oral sex and so, of course, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Note: Michael Cunningham later served on the Pulitzer Fiction jury during the infamous “no award” year in 2012.
Who Is Michael Cunningham?
Michael Cunningham (1952-present) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in the suburbs of La Cañada Flintridge, California. In reflecting on his youth, Cunningham later described himself as a slacker and not particularly bookish (he initially pursued an aspirational career as a rock singer) until he was encouraged to read Mrs. Dalloway as a student. He now credits Virginia Woolf as a chief catalyst for his love of fiction.
While studying at Stanford University in the early 1970’s, he initially thought about becoming a painter. He then took a course in literature and began writing short stories, later receiving his degree in English Literature. After graduation he wandered around the West for several years, supporting himself by tending bar while he worked on his writing. He was eventually accepted to the University of Iowa’s writers’ workshop on a Michener Fellowship (Note: James A. Michener previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his collection Tales of the South Pacific). Cunningham received an MFA from the University of Iowa and published several stories in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other magazines.
His first book, Golden States, was written in a hurry to beat a self-imposed deadline of his 30th birthday. During this period, he relocated to New York and worked as a secretary at the Carnegie Corporation before moving up to a position writing annual reports and news releases, all the while continuing his fiction writing. He published two more novels (A Home at the End of the World in 1990 and Flesh and Blood in 1995) before his success exploded with The Hours. To date, he has written eight novels, a panoply of short stories, edited a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose, published several nonfiction works, and has even been involved in Hollywood productions.
In 1988, Cunningham received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and in 1993, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1995, he was awarded a Whiting Award before he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing MFA program at Brooklyn College. He is currently a senior lecturer in the English department at Yale University.
Per a report in The Guardian in 2024, Cunningham maintains a home in Brooklyn and commutes nearly every day to his studio in Greenwich Village. His husband is psychoanalyst Dr. Ken Corbett, PhD., a professor at NYU in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, as well as a faculty member of The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Dr. Corbett also has a private practice in New York City. They do not have any children that I could find.
Michael Cunningham has given a great many lectures and interviews over the years, many of which are available online. I highly recommend listening to a few of them. On stage, Cunningham comes across as delightful, self-deprecating, and very funny.
Film Adaptations:
- The Hours (2002)
- Director: Stephen Daldry
- Starring: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels
Further Reading:
- If any fellow traveler on the Pulitzer journey happens to feel strongly about another Cunningham book, please feel free to drop me a comment below.
Literary Context 1998-1999
- 1998 Nobel Prize Winner: awarded to Portuguese author José Saramago (1922–2010) “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” As of the time of this writing, he is the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature from Portugal.
- 1998 National Book Award Winner: Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
- 1998 Booker Prize Winner: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
- According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling writer in 1998 was, once again, John Grisham with his legal thriller The Street Lawyer. Other notable bestsellers that year included Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, Bag of Bones by Stephen King, several Danielle Steel books, as well as Paradise by Toni Morrison (who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for Beloved).
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling was published.
- Holes by Louis Sachar was published.
- The third “Song of Ice and Fire” book was published, A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin.
- Tim O’Brien published Tomcat in Love.
- Orhan Pamuk published My Name Is Red.
- Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende was published.
- Philip Roth published I Married a Communist.
- Haruki Murakami published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
- Alice Munro published The Love of a Good Woman.
- China Miéville published King Rat.
- Ha Jin published Waiting.
- Diana Gabaldon published Hellfire.
- Aaron Allston published a couple more Star Wars X-Wing books (Iron Fist and Wraith Squadron). Ann C. Crispin also published the Star Wars novel Rebel Dawn, Timothy Zahn published Vision of the Future, and Michael Stackpole published I, Jedi.
- Raymond Benson published another James Bond continuation novel entitled The Facts of Death.
- Paulo Coelho published Veronika Decides to Die.
- Alexander McCall Smith published The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
- Roberto Bolaño published The Savage Detectives.
- Iain M. Banks published Inversions.
- Tom Wolfe published A Man in Full.
Did the Right Book Win?
I found The Hours to be a powerful albeit melancholic response to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, however I wonder if future generations of readers will look back on 1999 as another missed opportunity by the Pulitzer Prize. The snub of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver may well have paved the way for the surprising and controversial dual Pulitzer Prize-winners in 2023.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Picador USA, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York, 1998. The book is dedicated to Ken Corbett (Michael Cunningham’s husband) and features a unique epigraph from J.L. Borges and Virginia Woolf.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.