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Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.
In addition to later teaching at both Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has also taught at Stanford and Duke University Universities.
His best known work is his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over four million copies. It was made into a CBS television play, with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four as best supporting actress in the role of the freed slave Castalia. The novel was also adapted for a one-woman Broadway theatre play, starring Ellen Burstyn, in 2003.
Gurganus's other works include White People, a collection of short stories and novellas; Plays Well with Others, a novel; and The Practical Heart, a collection of four novellas, which won a 2001 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Men's Fiction category. His shorter fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, in addition to being included in the O. Henry Prize Collection and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
After living in New York City for a number of years, Gurganus returned to North Carolina, where he co-founded the political group Writers Against Jesse Helms and, as a result, appeared as himself in Tim Kirkman's 1998 documentary Dear Jesse. Gurganus has also taken a position against the Iraq War, most notably by citing his Vietnam War experience in an essay published in The New York Times Magazine, "The War at Home", published April 6, 2003, a few weeks after the invasion. Gurganus was also the inaugural guest editor of New Stories From the South, an annual collection of notable fiction by Southern writers published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, in 2006.
He is the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Award and a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.
Bibliography
Novels
Novella
Story collections
Online short stories
See also
External links
Categories: 1947 Births, Living People, 20th-century American Novelists, American Male Novelists, University Of Iowa Alumni, Sarah Lawrence College Alumni, Duke University Faculty, American Gay Writers, Lambda Literary Award For Gay Fiction Winners, Lgbtq People From North Carolina, Novelists From North Carolina, Stanford University Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Faculty, Iowa Writers' Workshop Alumni, American Lgbtq Novelists, American Male Short Story Writers, 20th-century American Short Story Writers, Writers Of American Southern Literature, Faulkner Award For Fiction Winners, Novelists From New York, United States Navy Sailors, Writers From North Carolina, 20th-century American Male Writers, 21st-century American Lgbtq People, Members Of The American Academy Of Arts And Letters
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