Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore
Born	Marie Lorena Moore (1957-01-13) January 13, 1957 (age 67) Glens Falls, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Short-story writer, novelist
Education	St. Lawrence University Cornell University (MFA)
Period	1985–present
Notable works	Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) Birds of America (1998) A Gate at the Stairs (2009) Bark (2014)
Notable awards	American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2006

Lorrie Moore (born Marie Lorena Moore; January 13, 1957) is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.

Biography[edit]

Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.^[1] The story, "Raspberries," was published in January 1977. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.

In 1980, Moore enrolled in Cornell University's M.F.A. program, where she was taught by Alison Lurie.^[2] Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact literary agent Melanie Jackson, who agreed to take her as a client. In 1983, Jackson sold Moore's collection Self-Help, almost entirely stories from her master's thesis, to Knopf.^[2]

Works[edit]

Short stories[edit]

Her short story collections are Self-Help (1985), Like Life, the New York Times bestseller Birds of America, and Bark. She has contributed to The Paris Review. Her first story to appear in The New Yorker, "You're Ugly, Too," was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Another story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," also published in The New Yorker, was reprinted in the 1998 edition of the annual collection The Best American Short Stories; the tale of a young child falling sick, the piece was loosely patterned on events in Moore's own life. The story was also included in the 2005 anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, edited by David Sedaris.

Moore's Collected Stories was published by Faber in the UK in May 2008. It included all the stories in each of her previously published collections, excerpts from her novel Anagrams, and three previously uncollected stories first published in The New Yorker.

Moore's latest collection, Bark, was published in 2014.^[3] It became a finalist of The Story Prize^[4] and was short-listed by Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.^[5][6]

Novels[edit]

Moore's novels are Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), and A Gate at the Stairs (2009). Anagrams, with its experimental form, received a rather cold critical response.^[7] Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is the story of a woman vacationing with her husband who recalls an intense friendship from her adolescence. A Gate at the Stairs takes place just after the September 11 attack and is about a 20-year-old Midwestern woman's coming of age.

Of Moore's 2023 novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, The New Yorker's Parul Sehgal wrote: "One might say of Lorrie Moore what she said of Updike—that she is our greatest writer without a great novel—but how tinny ‘greatness’ can feel when caught in the inhabiting, staining, possessing power of a work of such determined strangeness and pain. An almost violent kind of achievement: a writer knifing forward, slicing open a new terrain—slicing open conventional notions and obligations of narrative itself."^[8]

Children's books[edit]

Moore has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper, about an elf whom Santa Claus mistakenly leaves behind at the home of the worst child on his "good" list. The elf must help the child be good for the coming year so Santa will return next Christmas.

Essays[edit]

Moore writes occasionally about books, films, and television for The New York Review of Books.^[9] A collection of her essays, criticism and comment was published by Knopf as See What Can Be Done in April 2018.^[10][11]

Academic career[edit]

Moore was the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she taught creative writing for 30 years. She joined the faculty in 1984^[12] and left to join the faculty at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2013, where she is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.^[13][14]

She has also taught at Cornell University, as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, and at the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan, as well as at Princeton and NYU.^[15][16][17]

Bibliography[edit]

Short stories[edit]

• 1985 – Self-Help; ISBN 0-446-67192-4
• 1990 – Like Life; ISBN 0-375-71916-4
• 1998 – Birds of America; ISBN 0-312-24122-4
• 2008 – The Collected Stories; ISBN 978-0-571-23934-4
• 2014 – Bark; ISBN 0-307-59413-0
• 2020 – Collected Stories; ISBN 978-0-375-71238-8

Novels[edit]

• 1986 – Anagrams; ISBN 0-307-27728-3
• 1994 – Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?; ISBN 1-4000-3382-9
• 2009 – A Gate at the Stairs; ISBN 978-0-375-40928-8
• 2023 - I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home; ISBN 978-0-593-74415-4 ^[18][19][20]

Children's books[edit]

• 1987 – The Forgotten Helper; ISBN 0-440-41680-9

Non-fiction[edit]

• 2018 – See What Can Be Done; ISBN 978-1524732486

Awards and recognition[edit]

Moore won the 1998 O. Henry Award for her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," published in The New Yorker on January 27, 1997.^{[citation needed]}

In 1999, Moore was named as the winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Birds of America.^[21]

In 2004, she was selected as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.^{[citation needed]} She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006, and is a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters.^[22] In 2008, she delivered Oxford University's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute.

Her 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and for the Orange Prize for Fiction.^[23]

Bark was shortlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award^[24] and was a finalist for The Story Prize.^[25]

Her novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home was the winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.^[26]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Lorrie Moore.

• "About Lorrie Moore: A Profile" Ploughshares (Fall 1998)
• Salon interview (1998)
• Elizabeth Gaffney (Spring–Summer 2001). "Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167". The Paris Review. Spring-Summer 2001 (158).
• The Believer interview (2005)
• Interview with Lorrie Moore, Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show (October 2009)
• Interview for KCRW's Bookworm (October 22, 2009)
• “Words, Wit, & Wild Hearts: A Conversation with Author Lorrie Moore”, On Wisconsin (Spring 2010)
• Moore's essays for The New York Review of Books
• Archive of Moore's writings for The New Yorker