Who

Cunningham, author of The Hours, is a rare commodity in the publishing world: a bankable writer of high-brow fiction.

Backstory

Born in Cincinnati and raised in California, Cunningham attended Stanford and then went to grad school at the University of Iowa, where he picked up his MFA. His first two books, A Home At The End of the World and Flesh and Blood, garnered praise within literary circles, but it was 1998's The Hours, and its subsequent film adaptation, that propelled him to literary stardom. Despite his critical and commercial success, Cunningham has held onto his day job heading up the writing program at Brooklyn College.

Of note

The Hours—three intertwined Virginia Woolf-inspired storylines, set in different eras—won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award, and became a 2002 film starring Nicole Kidman (who won a Best Actress Oscar), Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Following the movie's box office success and massive acclaim, both of Cunningham's earlier novels were adapted for the screen: A Home At The End of the World was a 2004 movie with Colin Farrell and Sissy Spacek, and Flesh and Blood was made into a Showtime mini-series. Nothing, however, has equaled the impact of The Hours; Cunningham's fourth novel, 2005's Specimen Days, didn't make such a big splash, and his recent script adaptation of Susan Minot's novel Evening resulted in a poorly-received movie ("proves that not every book deserves its own film," said the New York Times).

Personal

Cunningham, who's in a long-term relationship with psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, writes frequently about gay characters yet bristles at the notion of being labeled a "gay author." "It matters about as much and as little that I'm a white man, an American, a member of the upper-middle class," he has said. Cunningham and Korbett live in the Village and have a second home on the waterfront in Provincetown, Mass.

True story

Cunningham's been arrested several times for civil disobedience. He says the worst part of it was being fed crunchy bologna, which turned out to have bits of bone in it.