Evaluative Essay on the Hours, by Michael Cunningham

Introduction

The Hours are a wonderful piece of literature written by Michael Cunningham after becoming inspired and falling in love with a book called Mrs. Dalloway, which were about three conflicting stories. All three stories occur in a different time and place. In Virginia's event, she writes about Mrs. Dalloway in Richmond in 1924, another woman living in Los Angeles, and 1949 Laura Brown's search for fulfillment with her husband yet the weird feelings about her second pregnancy. In New York, Clarissa Vaughan's story prepares a party for her friend Richard who is dying of aids.

Where do books come from? Michael Cunningham would be the first to say that innumerable influences make it impossible to track the genesis of the work. In the case of "The Hours," Cunningham's bestselling, critically acclaimed fourth novel, which is based on Virginia Woolf's great modernist work "Mrs. Dalloway," the birth of the complete book can be pinpointed to one moment more than 30 years ago when the writer was a 15-year-old student at La Canada High School. According to Michael Cunningham, he was out by the football field, talking to a very cool, very smart senior girl who he very much wanted to impress. He said something like, “I think Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are the two great artists of the 20th century”, and she said, calmly and not unkindly, “I wonder if you have ever heard of T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf?” This was the time when the author immediately went to the school library and took out a copy of "Mrs. Dalloway". It was a revelation; he says, in his characteristically light, insistent but slightly amused tone. The book expresses different sexual views across genders, with a strong emphasis on women (Cunningham, Pp18).

The writer's reflection

Going over the writing of the writer, it is fun to see that he worries sometimes that that his family reads his books and thinks, 'What did we do? Where could all this sorrow be coming from?' But according to hi, sorrow is a part of being human, mitigated, of course, by immense hope and optimism." Without his family, he does not know if he could have persevered as a writer through the years when he was not getting published (years of bar-tending in Laguna Beach, of traveling aimlessly, of getting involved with gay activism in New York), through the flop of his first novel, "Golden States," until finally a short story, "The White Angel."

It was published in the New Yorker in 1988, led to "A Home at the End of the World," which brought him widespread critical attention. It was during the hardest times that his family made “a huge, enormous difference,” he says, so steadfast was they in their belief that he was an artist. The entire family shows up for both readings: his parents, Don and Dorothy (who still live in La Canada Flintridge), and his younger sister, Kristie Clarkin, and her husband, David--with Kristie's dog, Maggie, ...