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C. Michael Curtis - C. Michael Curtis has been an editor at The Atlantic since 1963. Under his direction, the magazine has won numerous fiction prizes, including the National Magazine Award for fiction. More

C. Michael Curtis"Writers crave the intelligence and ardor of this magazine's editors and readership as well as the privilege of inclusion in its pages," says best-selling author Louise Erdrich, who, like so many young fiction writers, was introduced to national readership and subsequent success in The Atlantic Monthly.

Under the direction of senior editor C. Michael Curtis, The Atlantic Monthly's fiction has been nominated for a National Magazine Award virtually every year; in 1988 The Atlantic won this prestigious prize. Year after year short stories from the magazine are chosen for inclusion in the important annual prize collections. Curtis himself was the editor of American Stories: Fiction From The Atlantic Monthly, which was published in 1990. A second volume came out the following year, and 1992 saw the publication of Contemporary New England Stories. A companion volume, Contemporary West Coast Stories, was published in the fall of 1993. A fifth collection, entitled God: Stories, was published in December, 1998, by Houghton Mifflin, and a companion anthology, Faith: Stories, was published in 2003, also by Houghton Mifflin. His own essays, articles, reviews, and poems have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review, and Sport, among other periodicals. Curtis is also renowned for his teaching: he has taught creative writing, ethics, grammar, and other subjects for more than thirty years at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington, and elsewhere, and now teaches writing at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, SC, where he occupies the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities.

Curtis earned a B.A. in English from Cornell in 1956. He came to The Atlantic in 1963 after four years of study toward a Ph.D. in government, also at Cornell. Previously he had worked as a reporter for The Ithaca Journal, and as an editorial assistant at Newsweek. While he was a graduate student, The Atlantic Monthly published three of his poems and employed him briefly as a summer reader.

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'The Good Wife': Bad Nanny, Strained Marriage

By C. Michael Curtis

Apr 14 2010, 12:20 PM ET Comment



curtis_apr14_goodwife.jpg

CBS


The Good Wife was another repeat, in which Alicia saves the job of a doctor charged with prescribing lethal dose of oxycodone to a star high school athlete [the actual villain is a slimy health club hanger-on, trapped in a sting operation arranged by Alicia's legal assistants], who dies with heavy drugs in his system.

On the home front, Alicia hires a nanny as temporary replacement for her mother-in-law, felled by a heart attack. The replacement is young, highly skilled, and over-reaching product of graduate school mumbo-jumbo, who tries to protect Alicia's children from sexually transmitted disease, enraging Alicia, who has not been consulted, and getting herself fired—this event underlining Alicia's capacity to act decisively and fiercely where her children are concerned.

The program's managers refuse to let Peter have the heart-to-heart talk with his wife that the circumstances demand, preserving his depiction as a career-conscious politico paying lip service to penitence while pulling strings even in the lock-up, while Alicia demonstrates legal savvy, saintly patience, and a generosity of spirit intended to contrast sharply with the business-like lawyers she works with.
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