Biography

Armistead Maupin is the author of the iconic Tales of the City series. Launched in 1976 as a groundbreaking serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tales of the City has since blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a sequence of globally best-selling novels, to a Peabody award-winning television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, to an ambitious new musical that had its world premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in 2011. The series now encompasses eight hugely popular novels: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, and Mary Ann in Autumn. The final Tales novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, was released in January 2014. His latest book is the memoir Logical Family, which grew out of his critically acclaimed one-man show of the same name.

Mr. Maupin’s 1992 novel, Maybe the Moon, which followed the serio-comic adventures of a dwarf actress working in Hollywood, was named one of the ten best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. The Night Listener (2000), a psychological suspense novel inspired by an episode in the author’s own life, became a 2006 feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette.

In 1997 Mr. Maupin received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle of New York. He was honored with the Trevor Project’s Life Award “for his efforts in saving young lives” in 2002 and was the first recipient of Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award for his literary contribution to San Francisco. In 2012 he was awarded Lambda's Pioneer Award which is bestowed on individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature and publishing, and he also received the Visionary Award from the 2014 Outfest Legacy Awards for his collected novels. In 2014 he received an honorary doctor of letters from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the subject of a new documentary, Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. He lives with his husband, Christopher Turner, a photographer. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1999.

(November 2017)