Publication Order of Tales of the City Books
| Tales of the City | 1978 |
| More Tales of the City | 1980 |
| Further Tales of the City | 1982 |
| Babycakes | 1984 |
| Significant Others | 1987 |
| Sure of You | 1989 |
| Michael Tolliver Lives | 2007 |
| Mary Ann in Autumn | 2010 |
| The Days of Anna Madrigal | 2014 |
| Mona of the Manor | 2024 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Maybe the Moon | 1992 |
| The Night Listener | 2000 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Logical Family: A Memoir | 2017 |
About Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin is an American writer best known for “Tales of the City”, a series of ten novels published between 1978 and 2024 about a group of friends in San Francisco, many of them LGBTQ. The books began as a newspaper serial and have been adapted for television four times.
Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., on 13 May 1944 and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father founded a large law firm. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and wrote for its student paper, then worked at a Raleigh television station managed by the future senator Jesse Helms. He served in the U.S. Navy, including a tour in Vietnam, worked on a newspaper in Charleston, and joined the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971.
In 1974 he began writing a serial for the Pacific Sun, a Marin County newspaper. It moved to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, and the instalments were reworked into the first novel, “Tales of the City”, in 1978. Five more books followed by 1989, ending with “Sure of You”. “Babycakes” (1984) made Maupin one of the first novelists to write about AIDS. He returned to the characters in 2007 with “Michael Tolliver Lives”, told in the first person by Michael ’Mouse’ Tolliver, and continued with “Mary Ann in Autumn”, “The Days of Anna Madrigal” and “Mona of the Manor”, which was billed as the final book.
The first novel became a television miniseries in 1993, produced by Channel 4 and shown on PBS in the United States, with Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton and Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal. Showtime adapted the second and third books in 1998 and 2001, and Netflix made a sequel series in 2019. A stage musical opened in San Francisco in 2011.
Maupin has written two novels outside the series. “Maybe the Moon” drew on his friendship with the actress Tamara De Treaux, and “The Night Listener”, inspired by the Anthony Godby Johnson hoax, was filmed in 2006. His memoir, “Logical Family”, was published in 2017. He married Christopher Turner in 2007, moved to London in 2019 and became a British citizen in 2023.