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The Hours

The Hours

Context
Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1952 and grew up in Pasadena, California. After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in English Literature, Cunningham received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first novel, Golden States, appeared in 1984 to good reviews, though Cunningham has since dismissed the book in interviews. His second novel, A Home at the End of the World (1990), details the intertwined relationships between two boyhood friends and the way they cobble together a family that crosses boundaries of age, blood relationships, and sexual identity. The love triangle plot between a gay man, a straight man, and a straight woman reappears in different configurations in the love triangles that reoccur throughout The Hours. Cunningham’s third novel, Flesh and Blood (1995), moved away from the intimate depictions of closely knit characters that characterize Cunningham’s earlier works. Flesh and Blood is a sprawling account of an immigrant family’s rise to prosperity and the struggles they encounter across several generations, examining both the family’s troubled history and uncertain future.

The Hours appeared in 1998 to great acclaim, acclaim that greatly surprised Cunningham, who sawthe book as a literary piece that would find, at best, a small but appreciative audience. Critics lavished praise on the book, and Cunningham received both the Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. In 2002, Stephen Daldry adapted The Hours into a film. The powerhouse cast featured Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman (with a prosthetic nose) in an Oscar-winning performance as Virginia Woolf. Since The Hours, Cunningham has published a travelogue about Provincetown, Massachusetts, entitled Lands End: A Walk in Provincetown (2002). In 2005, he published Specimen Days, a novel that once again depicts three interconnected lives. This time, the characters are placed in a futuristic setting,...