Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is an American novelist whose work follows intimate relationships, chosen families, mortality, and the ways earlier literature survives inside contemporary lives. He studied at Stanford and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Hours. That novel interweaves Virginia Woolf as she begins Mrs Dalloway, Laura Brown reading the book in 1949, and Clarissa Vaughan preparing a New York gathering near the end of the twentieth century. The Hours Reading Group Guide is supplemental discussion material tied to the novel, not a separate fictional work or a substitute author identity. Questions about flowers, parties, caregiving, illness, and unrealized choices help readers compare the three narrative lines without reducing them to exact equivalents.