Inspired by Virginia Woolf and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham's best-selling novel, The Hours, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and became the Academy Award-winning film starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore. In Specimen Days, the prophetic figure of Walt Whitman presides over a genre bending tour through time as we follow the fate of three characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman, from the industrial revolution to the twenty-second century.