NORTH CAROLINA: Armistead Maupin To Get Honorary Doctorate From Alma Mater

This weekend beloved novelist Armistead Maupin will receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From their announcement:

Armistead Maupin, Carolina Class of 1966, grew up in Raleigh. As an undergraduate here he wrote a column for the Daily Tar Heel and was elected vice president of the senior class. After graduation, Maupin worked at WRAL-TV in Raleigh before enlisting in the United States Navy. Maupin later worked as a reporter in Charleston, S.C., and then with the Associated Press in San Francisco. In 1976, while at the San Francisco Chronicle, he launched the groundbreaking work that would propel his literary career for almost four decades. “Tales of the City” began as a serialized novel—perhaps the most successful example of that genre since Charles Dickens—and eventually became a sequence of nine globally bestselling books. In 1994, “Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City” became a PBS miniseries which won a Peabody Award.

On his Facebook page Maupin notes that he will attend the ceremony with his "legal California husband." (Tipped by JMG reader Richard)