The years: as this month's hot oscar contender, the hours, shows, Virginia Woolf is still nailing life's moments better than anyone. Here, writer Michael Cunningham tells why

I read Virginia Woolf for the first time when I was 15 years old, under duress, and was surprised to find that she rocked my little adolescent world. I remember thinking, Wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar.

I still insist, some 35 years later, on the similarities between Woolf and Hendrix, though there are not a lot of Woolf scholars who agree with me. If Woolf and Hendrix could somehow meet, I suspect she'd be considerably more interested in him than he'd be in her. I imagine she'd find him fascinating and he'd find her, well, white and off-putting.

Like Hendrix, Woolf adored extravagant rhythms; like Hendrix, she fearlessly courted chaos in her search for melodies no one had ever heard before. At 15, when I first laid eyes on her sentences-when I saw how she could make the language swoop and dive, how effortlessly she managed to lay one great booming sweep of imagery on another without ever sacrificing precision--I was hooked forever, on Woolf the author and, by extension, on literature in general. She helped save me from my miniature suburban life. She showed me that beauty and danger resided everywhere.

I tried to convey some of her magic into my novel The Hours, which is an improvisation of sorts on Woolf's great novel of 1924, Mrs. Dalloway. I fully expected it to be received as an arty and peculiar book, to sell several thousand copies, and then to march with whatever dignity it could muster to the remainders tables.

You can imagine my surprise that the novel was a hit, and my outright astonishment that it was made into a movie, one in which Nicole Kidman plays Woolf and is nothing short of brilliant. It is one of the thrills of my adult life to see Woolf's work and life generate this much heat.

We who love her do so for a number of reasons. Who knows, exactly, why certain authors live on and on? Academics point to their virtues, and the academics are generally right, but certain writers and certain books persist as mysteriously as does love itself. Questions of virtue don't ultimately matter all that much in love or literature.

I can tell you that, along with her ravishing use of the English language, along with her insistence that it be as big as a symphony and as exact as a needle's point, I continue to love her because she used it to tell the stories of people who are not generally supposed to be in novels at all. She focused exclusively on lives that appeared, to the untrained eye, ordinary, and even then, wrote about these people living through their less eventful days. She ignored the weddings and funerals, all the supposedly major news of our lives, in favor of the quotidian: the days of errands and visits, naps and dinner parties. She did so because she understood, and wanted us all to understand, that there are no insignificant days, that there are no insignificant lives--that any day in anyone's life contains most of what we need to know about all of life, very much the way the blueprint for an entire organism is imprinted on every strand of its DNA.

As we, mere individuals, seem to matter less and less in the general scheme of things, I can't imagine a more important writer than Woolf today. She knew that our lives, all our lives, are epic stories, and she had the power to tell our stories as no one has before or since.

Michael Cunningham is currently at work on a new novel.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Michael Cunningham hit artistic pay dirt mining Virginia Woolf's insight and wisdom in his novel The Hours. For his follow-up, currently in the works, Cunningham turned to another writer for inspiration--Walt Whitman. Says Cunningham, who sees similarities between the two literary mavericks, "They're both great artists and visionaries."

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