Lorrie Moore
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- For the journalist, please see Lori Moore
Lorrie Moore (born Marie Lorena Moore on January 13, 1957 in Glens Falls, New York) is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories.
[edit] Biography
Marie Lorena Moore was nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At nineteen, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. 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. Upon graduation from Cornell, one of her teachers encouraged her to contact agent Melanie Jackson. Jackson sold her collection, Self-Help, composed almost entirely of stories from her master's thesis, to Knopf in 1983. Moore was only twenty-six years old.
She has contributed to The Paris Review and her short story collections are Like Life, Self Help, and Birds of America. Her first story to be printed in The New Yorker, "You're Ugly, Too," was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Her story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," reprinted in the annual collection The Best American Short Stories and a tale of a young child falling sick, was loosely based on events in her own life. She writes frequently about relationships and terminal illness.
Her novels are Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Anagrams was optioned by Madonna for a film that was never made.
She has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper. It concerns an elf whom Santa 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.
She 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, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. In 2004 Moore was selected as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.
She is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
[edit] Bibliography
- (1985) Self-Help; ISBN 0446671924
- (1986) Anagrams; ISBN 0307277283
- (1987) The Forgotten Helper; ISBN 0440416809
- (1990) Like Life; ISBN 0375719164
- (1994) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?; ISBN 1400033829
- (1998) Birds of America; ISBN 0312241224
[edit] External links
- Ploughshares profile
- The Believer interview (2005)
- Salon interview (1998)
