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CORVALLIS - Michael Cunningham, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, "The Hours," will read from his work and discuss his career on Monday, April 7, at Oregon State University. His presentation will begin at 7:30 p.m. in LaSells Stewart Center. It is free and open to the public.

Cunningham's appearance is part of the OSU Visiting Writers Series.

"The Hours" was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and received several other nominations.

Both the book and film pay homage to Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, "Mrs. Dalloway." Part of the homage is stylistic: the novels by Cunningham and Woolf both focus on ordinary and transcendent moments of daily life. The homage also is an intricate part of the plot of "The Hours," which interweaves the stories of three women in different time periods.

There is a depressed housewife in 1949 Los Angeles who is reading "Mrs. Dalloway," a contemporary New York book editor whose dearest friend - a brilliant poet - is dying of AIDS, and Virginia Woolf herself, during the period she was writing "Mrs. Dalloway."

Cunningham, who previously had written two other acclaimed novels, nonetheless said he was taken completely by surprise when he was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Perhaps he shouldn't have been. Critics have hailed the book as a "literary tour de force" (USA Today).

Dwight Garner, a reviewer for Harper's Bazaar, wrote: "…this elegiac meditation on anger, mistrust, and loneliness has a ferocious perceptiveness that puts Cunningham on another level as an artist."

Cunningham's first two novels were "Flesh and Blood" (1995) and "A Home at the End of the World" (1990). He also has written several essays and short stories, including "White Angel," which appeared in the 1989 edition of Best American Short Stories.

His newest book, published in 2002, is called "Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown." It celebrates one of America's oldest towns, perched on the edge of Cape Cod.

Cunningham was born Ohio in 1952 and grew up in Pasadena, Calif. He has a B.A. in English literature from Stanford University, and a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa.

OSU's Department of English, The Valley Library, The Office of the Provost, and the University Honors College are sponsoring his appearance.