Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter, born on November 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in La Cañada Flintridge, California, and came of age as a writer through a mix of literary study, workshop training, and early publication in respected magazines. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is also Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.

His education gave him a strong base in literature and craft. Cunningham studied English literature at Stanford University, where he earned his degree, then went on to the University of Iowa. There he received a Michener Fellowship and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While still studying at Iowa, he published short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review, a sign that his fiction had begun to find serious readers early in his career.

One of those early stories, “White Angel,” later became a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. The story was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1989, published by Houghton Mifflin. Cunningham’s development as a writer was also supported by major fellowships and awards: a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, and a Whiting Award in 1995. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

The Hours established Cunningham as a major figure in American fiction. His 2010 novel By Nightfall was also well received by U.S. critics. His work has moved beyond the novel as well. He edited Laws for Creations, a book of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, and co-wrote, with Susan Minot, a screenplay adapted from Minot’s novel Evening. He was a producer on the 2007 film Evening, which starred Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep.

Cunningham has also worked in radio and television-related projects. In November 2010, he judged one of NPR’s “Three Minute Fiction” contests. In April 2018, it was announced that he would serve as consulting producer for a revival of the Tales of the City miniseries, based on Armistead Maupin’s book series. The miniseries premiered on June 7, 2019.

Cunningham is gay and is married to psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, but he has said he dislikes being referred to as a gay writer. While he often writes about gay people, he does not want the gay aspects of his books to be seen as their single, primary characteristic. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works in Manhattan. For readers, his words carry force because they come from a writer deeply trained in literature, active across fiction and screenwriting, and careful about how identity, art, and human experience are held on the page.