Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1947 to a teacher and a businessman. He first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While stationed aboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he began to write. Gurganus later graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he worked with Grace Paley, and earned a master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. He has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Duke, Sarah Lawrence, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His former students include the novelists Ann Patchett, Elizabeth McCracken, and Donald Antrim, among many others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

Gurganus's first published story, "Minor Heroism," appeared in The New Yorker in 1974, and offered the first gay character ever presented in the magazine. In 1989, he published his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This novel spent eight months on The New York Times bestseller list, became the subject of a New Yorker cartoon, and remains a clue on "Jeopardy." It has been translated into twelve languages and sold over two million copies. A television adaption, produced by CBS, won four Emmy awards. Blessed Assurance, a novella, has become part of the Harvard Business School's ethics curriculum. His collection of stories and novellas, White People, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pen-Faulkner Award. The Practical Heart: Four Novellas won the Lambda Literary Award. Gurganus's short fiction appears in The New Yorker, Harper's, and other magazines. His stories have been honored by the O'Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best New Stories of the South.

An eloquent critic of homophobia, racism, and American foreign policy, Gurganus's editorials often appear in The New York Times. Paris's La Monde called him "a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch."

Bibliography:

Plays Well With Others (1997)

The Practical Heart (1993)

White People (1991)

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1984)