Lorrie Moore
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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.
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, comprised almost entirely of stories from her master's thesis to Knopf in 1983. Moore was still 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 but 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.
She is a Delmore Schwarz Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin.