Allan GurganusSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

Of his previous work “The Practical Heart,” critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “Masterly and deeply affecting ... a testament to Mr. Gurganus’s ability to inhabit his characters’ inner lives and map their emotional histories.” The Atlantic called the same work, “An entertaining, disturbing and inspiring book -- a dazzling maturation.” Of “Local Souls,” Wells Tower wrote: “It leaves the reader surfeited with gifts. This is a book to be read for the minutely tuned music of Gurganus’s language, its lithe and wicked wit, its luminosity of vision -- shining all the brighter for the heat of its compassion. No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other. These are tales to make us whole.”

Gurganus’s first published story “Minor Heroism” appeared in the New Yorker when he was 26. In 1974, this tale offered the first gay character that magazine had ever presented. In 1989, after seven years’ composition, Gurganus presented the novel "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). This first book spent eight months on the New York Times bestseller list; it became the subject of a New Yorker cartoon and remains a clue on “Jeopardy” (Names for $400). The novel has been translated into 12 languages and has sold over two million copies. The CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland and Diane Lane and won and a “Best Supporting Actress” Emmy for Cecily Tyson as the freed slave, Castalia.

Along with "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," Gurganus’s works include "White People," (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist) as well as the novel "Plays Well With Others." His last book was "The Practical Heart: Four Novellas" (Lambda Literary Award). Gurganus’s short fiction appears in the New Yorker, Harper’sand other magazines. A recent essay was seen in The New York Review of Books. His stories have been honored by the O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Gurganus was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. His novella "Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale," from "White People," has become part of the Harvard Business School’s Ethics curriculum. The work is discussed at length in "Questions of Character" (Harvard Business School Press) by Joseph L. Badaracco.

Born in Rocky Mount, NC in 1947 to a teacher and businessman, Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections. Gurganus has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During a three-year stint on board the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. Gurganus subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he’d gone to work with Grace Paley. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Mr. Gurganus has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Duke, Sarah Lawrence, the Michener Center at the University of Texas-Austin, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His students have included the novelists Ann Patchett, Elizabeth McCracken, Chris Offut, James Hines, Ayana Mathis, Justin Torres, Kate Christensen and Donald Antrim, among many others. Gurganus is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Returned from Manhattan 20-odd years ago to live in his native North Carolina, Gurganus co-founded “Writers Against Jesse Helms.” He continues to be an eloquent critic of homophobia, racism and much American foreign policy. Gurganus’s political editorials appear in The New York Times.