It’s the birthday of Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), best known for his novel The Hours (1998), the story of three women across generations who are all somehow connected to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999 and was adapted for film in 2002 with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, and if you can name a more star-packed film I’ll eat my hat (a completely meaningless claim, as I don’t own a hat, but I have one of those warm winter headbands that skiers wear and I’d be happy to chew on that for a while).

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Pasadena, California, having an “embarrassingly ordinary childhood.” His father was in advertising and his mother a stay-at-home mom. Cunningham first wanted to be a painter but switched to writing while studying English at Stanford. He later got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and later still a bunch of fellowships, including a Guggenheim; by then, he’d already published his first and second novels, Golden States (1984) and A Home at the End of the World (1990). His third was Flesh and Blood (1995), but it was The Hours that made him a Big Hairy Deal.

The three main characters in The Hours are Virginia Woolf herself, fighting mental illness as she writes Mrs. Dalloway; Mrs. Brown, a WWII veteran’s wife who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 (and who Cunningham based on his mother); and Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary character who closely mirrors the protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham’s mother was not happy to appear as Mrs. Brown in her son’s novel, but as Cunningham said in an interview, “A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he’s any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.” (See the interview here.)

Pro tip: if you like shorter reads, you might try one of Cunningham’s novels. Cunningham doesn’t like writing or reading long novels. (Yet Cunningham loves the 500+ page tome The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. In fact, Cunningham was on the jury for the Pulitzer in 2012 when The Pale King was chosen as one of the three finalists. Mysteriously, the board awarded no Pulitzer that year, a decision very upsetting for Cunningham and the other jurists. He wrote about it here.)

Cunningham’s most recent novel is The Snow Queen (2014). He lives in New York City and lectures at Yale.

Have a cold sunny Wednesday, keep yourself well hydrated because why not, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.