He helped to engineer an on-air disturbance of the
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour in 1991. Both the gay content of his work and his personal activism overshadowed Cunningham's carefully crafted novels and delicate prose, and he rarely transcended this designation as a gay writer.
However, during the mid 1990s Cunningham's reception began to change. For example, in the Los Angeles Times (9 April 1995) Richard Eder called Cunningham "perhaps the most brilliant of the many novelists who have dealt with gay themes over the past dozen years, and one of our very best writers, in any case, on any theme." When Cunningham won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Hours (1998), his homage to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Eder's evaluation seemed to be confirmed; Cunningham is now considered one of the best prose writers of his generation, gay or straight.
Cunningham was born on 6 November 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Don and Dorothy Cunningham. Don Cunningham's advertising career led the family to make several moves, including a four-year residence in Germany, before they ultimately settled in Pasadena, California, when Cunningham was ten. In his teenage years Cunningham began to develop an interest in serious literature, reading works by Woolf and T.
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