The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Plot introduction The book concerns three generations of women affected by the classic novel Mrs Dalloway. In 1923 Richmond, outside London, author Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway and struggling with her mental illness. In 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading Mrs Dalloway while planning a birthday party for her husband, a World War II veteran. In 1999 New York City, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness. The situations of all three characters mirror situations experienced by Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, with Clarissa Vaughan being a very literal modern-day version of Woolf's character. Like Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan goes on a journey to buy flowers while reflecting on the minutiae of the day around her and later prepares to throw a party. Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan also both contrast their histories and past loves with their current lives, which they both perceive as trivial. Several other characters in Clarissa Vaughan's story also parallel characters in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham's novel also mirrors Mrs Dalloway's stream-of-consciousness narrative style (a style pioneered by Woolf and James Joyce) in which the flowing thoughts and perceptions of protagonists are depicted as they would occur in real life, unfiltered, flitting from one thing to another, and often rather unpredictable. In terms of time, this means characters interact not only with the present, but also memories; this contextualizes personal history and backstory, which otherwise might appear quite trivial—buying flowers, baking a cake, and such things. Cunningham's novel also uses the device in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway of placing the action of the novel within the space of one day. In Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is one day in the life of the central character Clarissa Dalloway. In Cunningham's book it is one day in the life of each of the three central characters; Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf herself. Through this prism, Cunningham attempts, as did Woolf, to show the beauty and profundity of every day—even the most ordinary—in every person's life and conversely