Author Michael Cunningham was born on the 6th of November in 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio. After studying English Literature at Stanford University , Cunningham attended the University of Iowa where he began writing short stories. One of his short stories “White Angel” was used later in his novel A Home at the End of the World.
His 1998 novel The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was later adapted to film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and won an Oscar in 2002.
The Hours is a beautifully written piece of literature that takes you through the lives of three very different women: middle-aged Clarissa Vaughan in New York during the 1990s; young housewife Laura Brown, living in 1940s Los Angeles; and Virginia Woolf, the author, in London during the 1920s.
Cunningham writes each character beautifully, each one is a 3-dimensional human being with individual thoughts and nuance. This is unfortunately rare for a male writer to achieve with female characters which makes this book especially wonderful. It is full of poignant moments, and sparks of excellent prose that make the reader take the occasional pause.
We have chosen 10 of our favourite quotes from Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning novel…
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