Allan Gurganus is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was awarded the Sue Kaufmann Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as best first work of fiction. Gurganus's collection of stories and novellas, White People, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Southern Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Practical Heart, a short novel from his next work, Recent American Saints, won the National Magazine Prize. Gurganus's work has been widely translated. He lives in a village of forty-five hundred souls in his native North Carolina.