When Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1998 novel The Hours just days after receiving the PEN/Faulkner award for the same book, a reporter asked if he was on his way to becoming an overnight sensation. Cunningham responded, "One of those overnight sensations who's been doing it for 15 years." Questions of timing aside, few fiction writers receive the mixture of critical and popular acclaim that Cunningham has garnered for his fourth novel, a work structurally and stylistically based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The film adaptation of The Hours, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, won a Golden Globe Award for best motion picture and was nominated for nine Academy Awards.

On Feb. 3, as part of a visit to CMC that culminated in his reading to a packed house at the Athenaeum and an overflow audience in McKenna Auditorium, Cunningham sat down with Audrey Bilger, associate professor of literature, and a small group of students, staff, and faculty in the afternoon to talk about literary influences and the success of his fourth novel.

BILGER: Could you tell us about the influence of Virginia Woolf on your work?

CUNNINGHAM: I grew up in La Caņada, California, where I was a not-very-precocious student. I wasn't exactly opposed to books: I just thought of them as dusty objects that were kept in the book jail over there, and I was over here, where life was. I was nattering on to this older girl-I was 15, and she must've been 17-about how much I loved Leonard Cohen's new album, and how I really thought that he was pulling ahead of Bob Dylan as an artist. And she looked at me and said, 'Have you ever thought of being less stupid? Why don't you read a book?' She said, 'Here, read this: Mrs. Dalloway.'

And I did. I tried to read it. I had no idea what Mrs. Dalloway was about. I couldn't find the story in it. But I could see the density and complexity and music in those passages, which was a revelation to me. I hadn't known you could do that with language. This was a rare flower. And I remember thinking, 'Oh, she was doing something like what Jimi Hendrix does with the guitar. She was like a rock star.' It was the first book that led me to understand how words could fly up off a page-how vital and transforming and juicy and alive the printed word could be. It made me into a reader, and then, ultimately, made me begin to want to be a writer.

As I kept trying to write fiction, I was bothered by the fact that to write a book about reading a book was deemed dry and academic. Why should the experience of reading, when it can be so enormous, be off-limits for novelists, except for very arcane experimentalists? That really was how it started. I wanted to write something about what it had meant to me to read Mrs. Dalloway.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham