The Hours: A Screenplay »

Michael Cunningham s novel A Home at the End of the World was published to acclaim in 1990; an excerpt, entitled "White Angel" and published in The New Yorker, was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1989. His novel Flesh and Blood was published in 1995, and that year he won a Whiting Writer s Award. The Hours, Cunningham s third novel, received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, David Hare's screenplay is published to coincide with the Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films release starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, and Miranda Richardson.

The Hours is the story of three young women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each exists at a different time and place; all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in a suburb of London in the early 1920s, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), in Los Angeles at the end of World War II, is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and finding it so revelatory she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life as a wife and mother. Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), in New York City today is a contemporary version of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and is in love with her friend Richard (Ed Harris), a brilliant poet dying of AIDS. Their stories intertwine and ultimately come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

About the Author

David Hare is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. Nine of his plays have been presented on Broadway, including Plenty, Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy's View, and Via Dolorosa, in which he also performed. He is currently writing the film of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and his new play The Breath of Life, with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, opens in London in October

USA Today - Ann Prichard

Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours is that rare combination: a smashing lliterary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse.