Allan Gurganus
“Allan Gurganus writes without a safety net; no precautions are taken against pathos, bathos, authorial indignity. Gurganus locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. He can do anything he likes as a writer.” ---So observed Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Nation.
Allan Gurganus, a North Carolina native, is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy) White People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen Faulkner Finalist), Plays Well with Others and The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). His stories have won the National Magazine Prize and the O’Henry Award. They are seen in Best American Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
The writer’s political editorials frequently appear in the New York Times. His leftward politics have made him a commentator on the Lehrer News Hour and NPR’s All Things Considered. Gurganus recently appeared in the PBS American Masters series as a scholar-reader regarding Walt Whitman, An American. Gurganus has taught literature and fiction writing at Duke, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stanford and Sarah Lawrence. The CBS version of Widow won four Emmys. The writer was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gurganus is finishing a collection of stories, Assisted Living. His novel-in-progress, second in the Falls Trilogy commending with Widow, is The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church. As widely read abroad as in his native country, Gurganus’ work has been translated into sixteen languages.
John Cheever wrote, “I consider Allan Gurganus the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation.”
