Born June 11: Allan Gurganus

Blessed with a runaway blockbuster selling two million copies, cursed with his biggest success coming with his debut, Allan Gurganus has seen his 1989 first novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All adapted in 1994 into a hit television miniseries nominated for nine Emmys, winning four, and in 2003 become a Broadway flop, closing after one official performance. Fifteen years before that book, at twenty-six in 1974, with the encouragement of John Cheever, he published a story called Minor Heroism in The New Yorker, which was the first time the magazine ran fiction with an openly gay protagonist. Thankfully, the gay characters have continued, though slowly. Recipient of a Guggenheim, a Lammy, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Ingram Merrill award, Gurganus is not a prolific writer. It had been twelve years since his last book, the really wonderful The Practical Heart: Four Novellas from 2001, when last year he published a new collection of three novellas once again set in his Falls, North Carolina: earning strong reviews, Local Souls [and Kindle] was chosen twice on Thebes' best books survey. Before these collections, in 1997 he published his second novel, the rollicking, sad, all-gay New York saga Plays Well with Others [and Kindle], and in 1990 the story collection White People. Gurganus long ago moved back to his native North Carolina where his activism included co-founding Writers Against Jesse Helms. Today is 67 and continues to work on his still-gestating third novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.