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Brooklyn, New York
- Cunningham lives in Brooklyn, New York and works in Manhattan.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cunningham
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Cunningham lives in Brooklyn, New York and works in Manhattan. [17] Bibliography. Cunningham reading at a W. H. Auden tribute in New York, 2007. Novels. Golden States (1984) A Home at the End of the World (1990) Flesh and Blood (1995) The Hours (1998) Specimen Days (2005) By Nightfall (2010) The Snow Queen (2014) Day (2023) Short stories.
Nov 20, 2023 · It takes place, literally, in a day, the same day in April, but the day is divided into three sections. Morning takes place in 2019, before the pandemic; afternoon in 2020 at the height of the pandemic; and evening in 2021, when people are shakily returning to a strange new version of “normal.”.
Feb 1, 2024 · On April 5, 2019, Dan and Isabel’s marriage is on rocky ground, their children Nathan and Violet grapple with the challenges of childhood, and Isabel’s brother Robbie, who lives with them, needs to get over his most recent boyfriend while looking for his own place to live.
Later made into an Oscar-winning film, Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel about the literary icon makes no pretence to know the 'real' her – and that's what makes it so true to her spirit,...
- Lillian Crawford
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Hours opens with the suicide of Virginia Woolf, who was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. She becomes a character in his book, as he weaves his depiction of her creation of her celebrated novel Mrs. Dalloway(1925) into the stories of two other women who are profoundly a...
Michael Cunningham was born on November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Don and Dorothy Cunningham. Due to the father's career in advertising, the family was always on the move until Michael was ten years old, when they finally settled in Pasadena, California. Cunningham's interest in literature began to develop when he was a teenager; he often rea...
Prologue
The prologue to The Hours focuses on Virginia Woolf in 1941, just as World War IIhas begun. "She walks purposely toward the river," feeling as if she has failed as a writer and noting the signs that her mental illness is returning. She gathers stones that she places in her pockets and wades out into the river. Suddenly, the current pulls her under. Back at their home, her husband Leonard finds the suicide letter she has written, telling him that she is certain she is losing her sanity and ins...
Part I
The novel moves back and forth between three stories that focus on three different women: Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, and Laura Brown. It begins in New YorkCity at the end of the twentieth century with fifty-two-year-old Clarissa, who needs to buy flowers for the party she is giving for her best friend and former lover Richard in honor of his winning the prestigious Carrouthers Prize for poetry. The narrator notes that Richard had given her the nickname Mrs. Dalloway when they were at c...
Part II
As Virginia walks in Richmond, she plans what will happen to Clarissa and thinks that perhaps she will love a woman but will eventually "come to her senses, as young women do, and marry a suitable man." When she returns to the house, she has a disagreement with the cook and wonders why she always feels intimidated by her servants and cannot establish a good relationship with them. In the apartment, Clarissa thinks about her relationship with Sally who has just left to have lunch with a film s...
A celebrated film version of The Hours was produced in 2002 by Miramax and Paramount, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore.
Vanessa Bell
Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, displays a robust healthiness that is in stark contrast to Virginia's own frailty. Vanessa provides the motive for Virginia's desire to create a perfect afternoon tea and gives her the guilty pleasure of a kiss behind the cook's back.
Dan Brown
Dan Brown, Laura's kind and gentle husband, has no idea how trapped Laura feels in her role as his wife and the mother of their son Richie.
Laura Brown
Laura Brown has become a traditional American housewife after World War II, a role that leaves her feeling "as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed." She determines that she should be happy with a kind and loving husband and child but she continually feels empty and unfulfilled. While she tries to become involved in the life of her family, as when she prepares a bir...
Insanity
Both Virginia Woolf and Richard experience mental instability which eventually pushes them to suicide. Woolf feels her mind slipping at the beginning of the novel, when Cunningham describes her hearing voices and feeling the headache that always signals the decline of her sanity. Awareness of the instability of her mind and the probability that she will never be cured inspires her to accomplish as much as she can while she can think clearly and write well. Her condition also arouses the desir...
Some critics have found Cunningham's portrayal of Virginia Woolf to be unnecessarily bleak. Read a biography of Woolf and write an essay arguing whether or not Cunningham presented an accurate port...Write a poem or a short story that focuses on a life-affirming moment.Compare and contrast characters, plot, setting, and theme in The Hours and Mrs. Dallowayin a PowerPoint demonstration.All three women in the novel experience feelings for other women. Write an essay that discusses the issue of lesbianism in the novel and its effect on the lives of the three women.Literary Allusions
A literary allusion is a reference in one work to other works of literature. Cunningham's allusions to the characters and themes in Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway give his own work a frame of reference with meaningful parallels if his reader already knows the literature and historical characters to which he refers, in this case the novel Mrs. Dallowayand the historical Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Clarissa's day parallels that of Mrs. Dalloway as she buys flowers for the party she is giving that...
Mrs. Dalloway
In the Woolf section of The Hours, Cunningham notes that Virginia considered London to be the center of life. The city, in fact, had for the historical Virginia Woolf a mystical significance, one which she recreated in her celebrated novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Cunningham reworked characters and themes from Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours, which was actually the working title of the earlier historical Woolf 's novel. Woolf's novel is set in London a couple years after World War I. It chronicles a...
Women's Roles in the United States in the 1940s
Laura Brown's limited choices in this decade, based on her gender, push her to consider suicide. During World War II, women were encouraged to enter the workplace where they enjoyed a measure of independence and responsibility. After the war, they were required to give up their jobs to the returning male troops. Hundreds of thousands of women were laid off and expected to resume their place in the home. Training began at an early age to ensure that girls would conform to the feminine ideal of...
AIDS
In 1978, cases of a virus, later identified as HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) appeared in the United States, Sweden, Tanzania, and Haiti. The U.S. public became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, and it became a widely discussed matter when film star Rock Hudson died from an AIDS-related illness in 1985. By the beginning of the 1990s, the disease had spread rapidly, generating public fear since no treatment had been discovered. Most...
The Hours has received overwhelmingly enthusiastic praise from readers and scholars alike. Many reviewers, such as Darlene E. Erickson in her essay on the novel for Christianity and Literature, applaud the novel's style. She comments that the "text is … rich and intricate" and that it is "refreshing" to discover a work "that is both beautiful and e...
Jul 31, 1998 · Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, ‘The Hours’ details the lives of three very different women. He opens his narrative with a fateful day in 1941 when Virginia Woolf has decided to fill her pockets with stones and walk into the river. The scene is heartbreaking.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
