The Pulitzer

Use this topic to comment on the various Pulitzer Prizes, including Fiction, Drama, History, Poetry, Biography, Non-Fiction, or Journalism. Also Music, on a less bookish note!

What, for instance, do you make of the fact that no Drama award was given in 2006?

I was very happy that Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer for fiction this year for March. I met her at a book signing a few weeks before it was announced. She's a very interesting person.

I agree that Brooks seems an interesting person, just as her husband Tony Horwitz does as well, and I enjoyed March quite a bit.

Well, I'm convinced - I don't have any Geraldine Brooks in my library at the moment, but I am going to seek out March (which for some reason isn't working properly as a touchstone).

I read Geraldine Brooks' first novel Year of Wonders and enjoyed it. Then I saw a fascinating interview with her on Australian TV so raced out to buy March. I hated it, but apparently I'm the only person in the world who did.

I agree with amandameale, I loved Year of Wonders, but really disliked March. I found the main character tepid and the story contrived. It may very well have been based on fact, but it wasn't alive for me.

I just received Year of Wonders through BookMooch, and after these recommendations I am eager to read it. Maybe I will move it up in my to-be-read queue.

Hate is a strong word for me, but I was very surprised at how weak I found March. I was unhappy with the main character, especially when compared to Little Women. I think Brooks conflated Jo March's father and Louisa May Alcott's father, where I think she should have only used the parts of Bronson Alcott that LMA decided to use when creating her character. Year of Wonders, on the other hand, was gripping and had strong characters.

Funny, I had just the opposite opinion. I thought that although Year of wonders had great touches, it was only OK overall. I found March to be pretty powerful. Both are a bit contrived, with anachronistic personalities. But, that seems hard to avoid with historical fiction (I haven't really read that much of the genre).

OK. So, I liked both March and Year of Wonders, but can't bring myself to read Nine Parts of Desire (non-fiction. I also read the Doctorow March, by mistake, but it was also about the Civil War and also an award winner (Pen/Faulkner). I liked it, too.

A couple of summers ago I decided to try to read all of the Pulitzer plays, and I managed to get through a large portion of them. In general I thought they were quite good, with the exception of Our Town, which is either a joke or just a really crummy play. We must remember that the Pulitzer winners do not have to be GOOD, they just have to represent the best example of American life in a given year.

I read Nine Parts of Desire on the emphatic recommendation of my mother and grandmother, and found it absolutely fascinating. I have yet to read any of her other work, however.

My reading resolution is to read all of the Pulitzer fiction prize winners. I'm almost half way through them.

I'm currently reading The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. I'm really enjoying it and finding it to be a refreshing change from familial angst which is more often than not the theme of the Pulitzers I've read.

Any one care to comment on your favorites and least favorites on this prize list?

Favourites that I can remember:
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt; The Hours by Michael Cunningham; The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields; The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx; A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

I did not enjoy American Pastoral by Philip Roth - it was too unpleasant - perhaps it was my mood at the time.
Likewise March by Geraldine Brooks which I found utterly boring. The Known World by Edward P. Jones was quite good but I found the structure hard to take and did not finish it.

I think the touchstone situation is deteriorating - I've just reached a new low of zero.

I've been having major touchstone problems too and posted it on bugs and site issues. The load while I'm composing my message and then disappear.

The favorites you mentioned are similar to mine - I really liked The Stone Diaries and like you American Pastoral was trying. The best thing I can say about it is that I learned something about Newark and the glove business.

I also liked So Big by Edna Ferber, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck and Advise and Consent by Allen Drury.

My least favorites include The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, flimsy plot that went nowhere and Beloved by Toni Morrison I found difficult to follow.

Overall, though, I'm thoroughly enjoying this endeavor.

Monday's the day for the announcement of the Pulitzer winners for 2007 and since the committee never puts out a 'short list', it's almost always a surprise when the winners are named. It's anyone's good guess as to who might win, but were I forced to pick one title that I think has the inside track, it would have to be Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

The Pulitzer prize for fiction has been won by Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the award for General Non-Fiction was won by Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and the History prize was won by Debby Applegate for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. No time to post the other winners but both John Coltrane and Ray Bradbury received Special Citations as well.

Nice call on the fiction prize, Louis!

I am struck with how few of the fiction prizes have gone to novels about women. I haven't studied this, of course; but I just looked back 18 years or so. One has to go back to 1989 and Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons. Well, perhaps we can count Middlesex..er...sort of. Considering the recent track record, The Road was kind of predictable...imho, of course.

avaland, what percentage of the subset of books that would get looked at for this prize are written by women, any idea?

I have no idea, it's not published. It's not women writers, it's books ABOUT women. The previous two winners were women writers (oh, and I know they hate that phrase! they are writers, not "women writers") but their novels were about men.

Someday I shall do a study on this, really.

A Thousand Acres was about women....and King Lear. :)

Did I miss that one, was that before '89? I got a little dizzy bringing up each year one at a time, I kept repeating years...so, yes, I could've missed one. But is King Lear about the daughters or the king:-)

Well, King Lear didn't win the Pulitzer either way. :) I'd say it's about all, like Macbeth is about both the Mr. & Mrs.

A Thousand Acres is a retelling of it (Now that you mention it, I don't remember the year it was published - '89 hust doesn't seem that long ago!). It is told in first person by the oldest daughter, definitely focusing on the women of the story.

King Lear is mainly about the king, but part of it is about his rejection of his youngest daughter Cordelia. Perhaps the connection to A Thousand Acres is that of a bad-tempered father showing favour or disfavour to one daughter? I have read it, I just remember the father as being horrible to everyone.

King Lear systematically rejects all three daughters. However, they are plotting and manipulative and deserve it. Huge parts of the play involve the daughters, especially Goneril. She is a much bigger figure in the play than Cordelia.

When somebody told me A Thousand Acres was a contemporary King Lear, I thought they meant it loosely. Then I read Lear. The connection to A Thousand Acres goes much farther than the relationship of a man to his youngest daughter. It is practically a scene-by-scene retelling, down to the lover and his relationship to both sisters. In both cases, the prodigal daughter comes home and stands by her meany dad. Even the poisoning of the middle sister plays a part (though here is where it changes) in Smiley's work. The body count is, of course, lower in ATA, but that makes it more relevant to the times. Another change is the children of the middle daughter.

Jeepers, I read this book and apparently have a memory like a sieve these days!

I just checked and it won the Pulitzer in 1992, still it's been 15 years! Women authors have won since but the stories are not the stories of women's lives. So, if March had been about Marmee (and based on the life of Abbie May Alcott, longsuffering wife of the eccentric Bronson Alcott) and written equally well and deeply, would it have won a Pulitzer? If Gilead and The Road were about a mother and daughter instead of father and son, would they have won the Pulitizer?
Sadly, I think not. Even the Interpreter of Maladies is a man, is he not?

I'm listening to The Road on audio now and I'll hold my comments until I've finished. I'm enjoying the excellent, spare prose. What age did you assume the boy was, btw?

#19: When we have writers as great as Virginia Woolfe, or Anita Brookner, or Muriel Spark, or Elizabeth Bowen, or Iris Murdoch, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, or Sybille Bedford, or Penelope Lively, or Penelope Fitzgerald, or Ivy Compton-Burnett , or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or Christina Stead, or Alice Munro, or Alice Adams to name just some British or commnwealth or ex-commonwealth authors, maybe there will be more pulitzers for women. Our greatest unsung living author is Joyce Carol Oates who I think is discriminated against because she is so prolific, and writes as much as any 20 or 30 other authors. She should have had the Nobel prize years ago. Her work is noir, yes, but fantastically well written, and a mirror of much of our society. AND she is a poet, and a critic, and a professor, and a mystery writer as Rosamund Smith besides being a novelist.

I think Oates should have won the Nobel Prize a long time ago, Philip Roth should have won too.

#26 & 27 Geez, my memory's no good either. I remember Cordelia from King Lear becauase she was the only daughter who was honest with him, but that's another story. (And perhaps that's wrong as well.)
#28 & 29 I've just been reading the list for the Booker International Prize for Fiction (see other thread) and you will find some women and Philip Roth on this list.

#30

I remember Cordelia from King Lear because she was the only daughter who was honest with him, but that's another story. (And perhaps that's wrong as well.)

That's right. She refused to play the fawn-over-dad game, so she was rejected. then she disappears from the play until the very end. That's why it's sometimes more fun to play the villain than the 'sympathetic' character. Well, that's only one of the reasons it's more fun...:)

>msg 19 I am struck with how few of the fiction prizes have gone to novels about women.

1995 -- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

>msg 19 I am struck with how few of the fiction prizes have gone to novels about women.

1995 -- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

Must've missed that one also. So, the stats are better than I feared but still the trend of the last few years strikes me as a bit of a trend...but perhaps it is just me...

i've got to put a plug in for michael shaara's "the killer angels" (1975) because he's the only pulitzer winner who was a friend of mine. hoohah!

i took classes from him from 1970 through june, 1972, and in the spring of 1972 he read to us from his current manuscript about Longstreet surveying the battlefield. I had no idea I was listening to a future Pulitizer winner. The book went on to be used as a primer for the US Army Command and General Staff College and his son, Jeff, has done well with his own war novels.

The Killer Angels is great - definitely one of the best historical fiction books on the Civil War. I have reread it more than once, and will undoubtedly read it again. I thought the movie based on this book (titled "Gettysburg") was also better than most.

You know, I have tried Phillip Roth and Oates and could not wade through either one. It was in my youth and maybe I should try again, but I just found them so darn wordy.

Just finished On Beauty by Zadie Smith and I liked it well enough that I am reading White Teeth.
I have several more Pulizers lined up to read.

Zadie Smith surely hasn't won the Pulitzer, has she?
I thought it was only for U.S. citizens...

Sorry, meant for other group, 1001 Books

Sorry from me too - I wasn't trying to catch you out, I was just a very confused European for a while there!

I am often confused. Some days I wonder how I find my way to work. Also belong to too many groups.

the Stone Diaries was this weeks book, and I felt pretty depressed at the end. Is growing old, dependent and dying all we have to look forward to? The book was very readable, and I enjoyed it, but there weren't really any feel good moments involved.

I thought the Stone Diaries was a good read but not a prize winning book. It just did not have any innovative or exceptional ideas to it. I liked it. I did not think it was a new classic.

Personally, I think the best winner of the Pulitzer in the past few years has been Michael Chabon. Now there is a good writer!

Dammit Karen! Now I have to buy a book by Michael Chabon and I was trying not to buy at all.

Sorry to add more fuel to the fire, Amanda, but I'll second Karen on the Chabon kudos--he's one of my favorite authors.

Amanda - if the book buying thingy is soooo bad - I can send you my copy? Leave me a message if you want it.

#47 Thank you Karen but I assure you, I always enjoy buying a book.

Just coming by to wave - I am participating in a Pulitzer book challenge, and I am enjoying the comments about prize winners here on this thread.

I am currently reading Empire Falls by Richard Russo. Very enjoyable so far - but I am waiting for the "umphh" to kick in. =)

I loved Empire Falls. I thought it was one of the best of the Pulitzers that I have read so far. I was interested in the link provided in message 49, but on a government computer and can't access from here.
I am reading two Pulitzers at the same time. Martin Dressler is my day time book and Kavalier and Clay is my bathtub/bedtime book. I just finished The known World which is really good also.
I am surprised at how many good books I have missed over the years.

I am enjoying Empire Falls too. I hope you can check out the Pulitzer Project challenge I linked in message #49. It's a great way to motivate yourself to read more Pulitzers. It is amazing how many good books I have missed too over the years! But boy am I catching up now! =)

I am getting the books in the mail faster than I can read them. I got Shipping News yesterday.

The 2008 Pulitzer winner (and the finalists considered) will be announced on April 7. Any thoughts on who will win this year?

Here are three that I think might win:

* The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
* Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

> 54

One out of three! (Diaz won.)

I can't believe Tracy Letts won, though. I've never been terribly impressed by his plays, though I suppose the Steppenwolf connection helps him.

Glad to see that John Kass, although nominated for Commentary, didn't win. He never lets a fact get in the way of his bias, and he never heard of gray.

For everyone:

Winner: The brief and wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
(congratulations to 3M3m, your prize cookie is in the mail)

Other nominees:
Tree of smoke by Denis Johnson
Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal

Well the whole thing is certainly male dominated isn't it.

I believe Lore Segal is female, though historically you are quite right.

Of t he 83 Pulitzers for fiction, counting this year, by my count 22 are women and I admit to maybe having missed one or two, not being familiar with the names. The third winner was a woman, Edith Wharton, and women were rather well represented--until a long spell from 1938 to 1960 when the only winners were men. However, the prize wasn't awarded in every year. Then, after that, women appear again. Haven't looked at the list long enough to decided if they have been as prevalent winners after 1960 as before--my impression is no, but that's just an impression.

Lore Segal is a woman; in fact, I've met her. She wrote some great books, including Other People's Houses and Her First American, so I was very excited about Shakespeare's Kitchen since she hadn't written anything for adults in years. It was good, but not as good as I had hoped and not, in my opinion, Pulitzer material (although the earlier books would have been).

One of the interesting things about the Pulitzer criteria is NOT that it's "the best book of the year" but that it is the most distinguished full-length piece of fiction (although collections of stories have won) by an American author, preferably dealing with American life published the previous year. The "preferably" saved Annie Proulx, in my opinion, with The Shipping news, which was hardly about American life although it had a more or less American protagonist.

I've also read somewhere that maybe an informal criterion is that the work is the one that best represents American life/culture for that year. That doesn't appear, however, in the formal list from Columbia University.

So, maybe the judges felt that Segal for last year deserved nomination, given the "competition".

I've been reading thru the Pulitzer winners from teh first one, and am now on 1925 (having read some others from later on as well), and I'll tell you, the apparent quality does vary. and rebeccanyc, in the same vein that you're talking about, Willa Cather won in 1923, I think, for One of Our own, which was very good--but if I had my choice, it would be Death Comes for the Archbishop. But who knows what the pool was or the judges or any other factor involved? In 1923, a story about a Nebraska boy volunteering for the American Expeditionary Force and his experiences in World War I would have been popular, I would think.

My response to the announcement of the Pulitzer winner this year was: "Yet another book about a man's life."

If you look at even the winners which were written by women an extraordinary percentage of them are about men. Not sure we included content on the separate older thread where we discussed the gender parity of the awards. . .

Very true, avaland, very true. I can't remember all of them, but maybe half of the ones written by women were about women's lives, and that's probably stretching it. And I would include there Age of Innocence, even though the story is ostensibly about a man. That book seems to defy categories.

avaland, I didn't do a page breakdown but I'd say around half of this year's winner is about Oscar's mother (and sister). Maybe more. A lot of readers liked her story better than they liked Oscar's.

Still, the title is Oscar's, isn't it? I think one has to go back as far as 1995 when The Stone Diaries to get a female protagonist (unless you count part of Middlesex, and ultimately 'she' chose to be a 'he'). If you don''t count that, that's 13 years. One would think the trend would go the other way . . .

If we haven't posted the whole list yet:

Fiction

1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
1950 The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
1951 The Town by Conrad Richter
1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1954 (No Award)
1955 A Fable by William Faulkner
1956 Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
1957 (No Award)
1958 A Death In The Family by the late James Agee (a posthumous publication)
1959 The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner
1964 (No Award)
1965 The Keepers Of The House by Shirley Ann Grau
1966 Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter
1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1970 Collected Stories by Jean Stafford
1971 (No Award)
1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1973 The Optimists Daughter by Eudora Welty
1974 (No Award)
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1976 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
1977 (No Award)
1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole (a posthumous publication)
1982 Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike, the latest novel in a memorable sequence
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy
1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
1991 Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford
1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks
2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

(sorry, no patience for touchstones this evening; may come back and do it on another day)

Actually, the prize for "fiction" goes back to 1918, only it was for a "novel"; Columbia University changed it to "fiction", probably in 1948.

I think that some of the books are really hard to classify. What do you say about The Yearling? Or To Kill a Mockingbird? These are really about children. Or, for that matter, the first winner His Family--which is far, far more about Roger Gale's 3 grown daughters--written surprisingly sympathetically about 3 very different personalities--than about Gale himself. Or The Able McLaughlins, which is more or less formally about a young couple, but there is a mother in there who is incredibly strong and almost as important as the couple themselves.

Also, avaland, are you talking about the most recent winners? Because there are female protagonists in your list pre-1995--maybe more than I know, because I'm not familiar with the collected works of Porter or Stafford or some other books. I'm confused by your time reference (but then I'm easily confused!)

I simply don't know enough about too many of the winners, but it seems to me that it's a little hard to make definitive categorizations about gender of protagonist.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there was a long dry spell when no women won the prize. But again, there are too many I know nothing about to talk about content.

62: That's because men are more important.

:)

Avaland: I think the awards are spot on for getting the important writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, Roth, Malamud and Updike among the men, and Toni Morison, Annie Proulx, Katharine Anne Porter, Jane Smiley, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Jean Stafford, Carol Sheilds, and Anne Tyler among the women.

Important women writers that were left out in the period, imo, were Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Hortense Calisher, Shirley Jackson and Grace Paley.
Edited to ask if Edith Wharton ever won? or Ellen Glasgow?

Pearl Buck won a Nobel Prize. Did she ever win a Pulitzer?
I would consider Jessamyn West as an important woman writer (1940-1960)

#62 Yes, I see you there Shortride.
What everyone needs is a copy of Great Housewives of Art by Sally Swain.

Interestingly - women were better represented between the wars:

1947: All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
1946: no award given
1945: A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
1944: Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
1943: Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair
1942: In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
1941: no award given
1940: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1939: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1938: The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand
1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1936: Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis
1935: Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
1933: The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling
1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1931: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
1930: Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge
1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1927: Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
1926: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined prize)
1925: So Big! by Edna Ferber
1924: The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
1923: One of Ours by Willa Cather
1922: Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1920: no award given
1919: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
1918: His Family by Ernest Pool

>thanks, jargoneer, I did notice that (women winners), and thanks for posting the older winners (I hadn't even noticed the list didn't include them all!). It would be an interesting study to know how many have outright female protagonists, but perhaps another day:-)

>joycepa, sorry about the confusion with the time reference. Perhaps it is better said as: To the best of my knowledge, there have been no female protagonists since 1995. I did have to look up the synopses for a few of the titles I was less familiar with to be sure.

Hello:

I have just finished listening to Thousand Acres in audiobook format. Is there anyone who remembers the book, who would like to talk about it. It is ONE peculiar book, I think.

The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced on April 20. Anyone have any guesses on what will win?

Friday's Christian Science Monitor has an article about a regression analysis based model built to predict which books would be most likely to win the prize. The web site can be found here. Last year's model ranked the winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, #3, and a finalist, Tree of Smoke, #5.

These are the 15 books the model predicted, in order of probability:

1. Home by Marilynne Robinson
2. The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
3. Indignation by Philip Roth
4. The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon
5. Fine Just the Way it is by Annie Proulx
6. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
7. A Mercy by Toni Morrison
8. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
9. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
10. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
11. Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
12. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
13. My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates
14. Lush Life by Richard Price
15. Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Of these, I would rate the 4 books I've read this way:

1. Netherland
2. Lush Life
3. The Plague of Doves
4. Indignation

Of course, this is meaningless since I've only read 4 of the 15 listed and since I would have given last year's award to Tree of Smoke.

2009 Pulitzer Prize winners:

Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Drama - Ruined by Lynn Nottage

History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin

General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

Music - Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA

Finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes:

Fiction
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
All Souls by Christine Schutt (Harcourt)

Drama
Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo
In The Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes

History
The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot

Biography or Autobiography
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

Poetry
Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart
What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems by Ruth Stone

General Nonfiction
Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman
The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcock

Music
7 Etudes for Solo Piano by Don Byron
Brion by Harold Meltzer

Thanks kidzdoc! For once I've read fiction winner before it won, although I my opinions were mixed on it.

I did read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before it won the 2008 prize. I haven't purchased or read Olive Kitteridge yet. What did and didn't you like about it, Dan?

I read it in January 2008, so my memory isn't sharp. I don't know that there was anything specific I didn't like. I did admire Strout's subtleties, much of which I probably missed. It's a collection of loosely connected short stories. Many of the early stories felt very soft to me, and finally one story drove me nuts (A Different Road) so I put down to read something else. I enjoyed the last several stories when I picked it up again...I guess just, overall, I felt it didn't have much of an effect on me.

There have been a lot of positive comments on LT, I'm just one reader.

Those comments are helpful; thanks, Dan. I may pass on this one.

I can't comment on Olive Kitteridge since I haven't read it, or on the runner-up by Christine Schutt, but even though I enjoyed it, I wouldn't have considered A Plague of Doves a runner-up in a year with much other good fiction.

I started Olive Kitteridge a couple of weeks ago but put it to the side. I've intended to pick it back up, but it just hasn't called to met yet. I don't tend to be a big fan of short stories anyway but I will definitely make sure to give it another go soon.

#84 It's not a set of short stories.
I liked Olive Kitteridge very much but I'm surprised it's the winner.

Olive Kittredge was one of my favorite reads of the year. I can't say I'm familiar with much of the competition, but on a personal level I am pleased that Strout won the prize. And I agree with amandameale; it should be read as an entity, not as a collection of individual stories.

Thanks for the advice to read Olive as a whole. Maybe that's where I was going wrong!

I'm in the middle of Olive Kitteridge right now and I'm glad to heard mixed feelings here. I have also put it aside for a while. Slow and depressing are how I would describe it so far. I just wrote in another post, it wasn't calling to me either. I don't normally read short stories but I did love Unaccustomed Earth. I will finish Olive Kitteridge, maybe I will also enjoy the last few stories better. It is kind of neat to have been reading this before it was announced, I feel quite in the know.

After I read Hotel Honolulu for a book discussion group at church I read a lot of reviews of the book, and they were pretty polarized. I ran across a review of reviews that said that the reviewers who didn't like the book had mostly read it as a series of short stories while the reviewers who did like the book had mostly read it as the narrator's tale. That seemed true to me. I had unwittingly read it as the latter and enjoyed the work.

I have put Olive Kitteridge on my Barny Noble wish list.

Robert

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today:

Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding

History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Biography: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout

General Nonfiction: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman

More info:

2010 Pulitzer Prize winners

Never even heard of Tinkers, but Lords of Finance is on my TBR for my next financial read and The Dead Hand sounds fascinating and I hadn't heard of it either.

I just wrote an article about the unknown Tinkers. Now that it's been brought to my attention, I see glowing reviews. Has anyone read it?

I read Tinkers when it was first published, early in 2009, and I praised it to all who would listen to me, including complete strangers in bookstores. I can't believe I haven't posted a proper review on here for it, but I will rectify that shortly. Suffice to say, I am full of giddy surprise that a first novel from a small publisher that so moved me managed to snag this prize. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves beautiful, poetic, descriptive writing.

#93 - Please let us know when you post your review. I would love to read it!

#94 - Review has been posted. I tend to be vague in my reviews to tease you into wanting to read it. Some of the other reviews include passages from the book which illustrate the nature of Harding's writing which so moved me.

I think avaland has read Tinkers?

Yes, I read Tinkers ages ago it seems. I was on my best books of '09 list and I think I probably reviewed it **(ha! no excuses for you Club Read members for not having heard about it!). Succinctly - it's a very lyrical novella, nicely done father son story set in Maine and Massachusetts, if I remember correctly (it's very New Englandy).

** I checked. I had the first review of this book back in January '09 (there is nothing I like better than finding and reading a book before it wins a prize!)

>96 amandameale: did I send it to you? I should have. If I didn't, I will.

>93 TheTwoDs: why should this surprise you? The book was covered with ecstatic blurbs from all kinds of notable people (enough to make me very skeptical...) And it's distributed by Consortium Books, so it had national distribution (oh course, whether a bookstore chose to carry such a book is another story entirely). I believe the book was also a selection of the ABA's "Indie Bound" and, in checking the site, it was reviewed glowingly by The New Yorker and on NPR (and the usual PW and Booklist) .

Does the Pulitzer has some kind of Maine tilt? Two Maine-set winners in a row.

# 98 - Surprised because it had never come up as one of the books being considered. The blurbs, while glowing and from well-respected authors, were also from Harding's mentors and fellow visiting staff at IWW. Finally, national distribution is not the same as having a major publisher with a marketing department behind it. Yes, it received glowing reviews, but that doesn't always translate into a major award. In any case, I'm thrilled it won.

Thanks for posting your review, Darin!

>99 dchaikin: LOL! Actually, if I remember correctly, it's set partially in Maine and partially in Massachusetts. Well, we Mainers are prize-winning subjects;-)

>100 TheTwoDs: that is true about not having a marketing machine behind it and, I am definitely with you in that I'm tickled that it won, and it is indeed lovely to have some attention paid to the great works by smaller presses (on the National Book Award shortlist, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell was published by Wayne State University Press. I think it has now been picked up by Norton). I think I was just lucky to pick it up off the shelf, I spotted it because it was new. And I bought it because I thought it sounded unusual and I'm drawn to lyrical prose and well, there's the Maine/Massachusetts connection (ironically, I bought it in New Hampshire).

Last night my husband came home and wanted to check our copy as he saw someone on Abe Books selling one for $1000. That's pretty ambitious even if the book was original paperback with a small print run.

Here's an article from The Boston Globe about how the novella was nearly not published...

btw, here's a short bio and a sampling of the work of Rae Armantrout, the poetry winner. The link goes to her page on the Poetry Foundation's site.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced:

Fiction - No award

Drama - "Water by the Spoonful" by Quiara Alegría Hudes

History - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by the late Manning Marable

Biography - George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

Poetry - Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

General Nonfiction - The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Music - "Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts" by Kevin Puts

This is the first time since 1977 that an award for Fiction was not announced. According to the Pulitzer Prize web site, "Nominated as finalists in this category {Fiction} were: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years; and The Pale King by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace."

More info: http://www.pulitzer.org/

I am dying to know more about the conversations that led to "No award".

From the Huffington Post:

Three finalists were named: David Foster Wallace for "The Pale King", Karen Russell for "Swamplandia" and, Denis Johnson for "Train Dreams."

And yet this year, for the first time since 1977, the committee has decided that no book is worthy of the prize. The three jurors were Susan Larson, the former book editor of The Times-Picayune, Maureen Corrigan, book critic for Fresh Air on NPR, and the novelist Michael Cunningham.

According to the book "The Pulitzer Prize Archive", in 1977 the board vetoed the jury's decision to give the prize to "A River Runs Through It", saying that none of the shortlist were prizeworthy. In 1984, the board overruled the jury, and gave the prize to a different book.

This year, according to a tweet by Publisher's Marketplace news editor Sarah Weinman, the board "failed to reach a majority" on the issue.

This wasn't the only no-award this year - the category of Editorial Writing was also deemed unworthy of a winner.

This refutes my hypothesis that last year's Booker Prize judging committee found a new home on this side of the pond.

Interesting. I've adored A River Run Through It both times I read it, both times being awhile ago now.

(As for The Pale King, note that the same prize did not even shortlist Infinite Jest (published in 1996)...)

>105 kidzdoc: - judges have been over-ruled quite a number of times pre-1977, for example it happened in 1974 when they rejected Gravity's Rainbow; they also rejected For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1941.

Still, everyone should bear in mind 1970 when the committee rejected all three novels put forward - the writers were Saul Bellow. Joyce Carol Oates and Eudora Welty.

Good publicity for the prize though.

I would have given A River Runs Through It the prize in a heartbeat. On the other hand, nominating Swamplandia! suggests to me that there really was nothing worthy of the prize this year. I was incredibly disappointed in that book and could not even be bothered to finish reading it, although I know it has some hearty supporters here.

Passing over Gravity's Rainbow, For Whom the Bell Tolls and A River Runs Through It doesn't exactly establish a good track record.

This was an interesting piece at The Guardian:
Pulitzer should take a leaf out of the Orange prize's book

I ran some data on recent award-winners just to see how the average LT reader rating compares. The Pulitzer may have made some big mistakes, but its record on the whole is rather surprising:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/136025

One of the judges speaks out about the board not awarding the prize for fiction:

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/17/150787166/why-no-pulitzer-award-for-fiction-this-y...

Thanks for posting that link, 1morechapter.

I've posted my review of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction work, The Swerve, about the ongoing impact of the rediscovery of an ancient poem called On the Nature of Things. It's a wonderful book, and the review's in my thread...post #190.

Pulitzer Prize 2013

FICTION:
“The Orphan Master’s Son,” by Adam Johnson (Random House)

Finalists:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Alfred A. Knopf)
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown).

DRAMA:
Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar

Finalists:
“Rapture, Blister, Burn,” by Gina Gionfriddo;
“4000 Miles,” by Amy Herzog.

HISTORY:
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (Random House)

Finalists:
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn (Alfred A. Knopf);
“Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,” by John Fabian Witt (Free Press).

BIOGRAPHY:
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (Crown)

Finalists:
“Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece,” by Michael Gorra (Liveright);
“The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy,” by David Nasaw (Penguin).

POETRY:
“Stag’s Leap,” by Sharon Olds (Alfred A. Knopf)

Finalists:
“Collected Poems,” by the late Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf);
“The Abundance of Nothing,” by Bruce Weigl (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern).

GENERAL NONFICTION:
“Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys,” by Gilbert King (Harper)

Finalists:
“Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” by Katherine Boo (Random House);
“The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature,” by David George Haskell (Viking).

Right well I've got Orphan Master's beside the bed ready to read. Has anyone else read it?

I've recently listened to the audio of Orphan Master and liked it very much.

Thanks for that avatiakh...that's good to know....I should listen to more audio books...

I read The Orphan Master's Son a few weeks back and thought it was brilliant. I even nominated it as a potential Pulitzer winner, although I did have to temper that with a "I haven't read much American literature of late" caveat. (Lots of fun fiction, not much highbrow literature.) Rather chuffed to see I got something right, I'm usually way out with guessing winners. :)

speaking of being way out with guessing, and the orphan master's son ...do any of you participate in or follow the tournament of books each march? i did a fantastically horrendous job with my brackets this year, haha!!

I read Lev Grossman's Tournament of the Books comments on The Orphan Master's Son and that convinced me to try the book. I don't follow Tournament of the Books usually but a blogger had linked to comments made by Natasha Vargas-Cooper in one of the rounds so I had a look.

re: #121, avatiakl

cool! grossman's commentary was really great! i am glad you read the novel because of that. actually, the decisions written by most of the judges this year were really fantastic. it was a great, if surprising sometimes, tournament.

This year's Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced:

Fiction: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Drama: The Flick by Annie Baker
History: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor
Biography: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall
Poetry: 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri
General Non-Fiction: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin

More info: http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/2014_LongList_PressRelease.pdf

ETA: These are the finalists for the Pulitzer book prizes:

Fiction: The Son by Philipp Meyer, and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis
Drama: The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence by Madeleine George, and Fun Home by Lisa Kron
History: A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America by Jacqueline Jones, and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
Biography: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch, and Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber
Poetry: The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech, and The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka
General Non-Fiction: The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass, and The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan

So so happy that The Goldfinch took home the Pulitzer for fiction! Yay!

I wish I had heard about Margaret Fuller the other day. I have read a book on the Peabodys, and I suspect it was the one by Megan Marshall, fully readable and informative. On this day Barny Noble has shipped to me Charles Capper's two volume life of Margaret Fuller which I ordered last week based on the huge number of citations of it in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism.

Robert

Washington Post and Guardian share Pulitzer Prize for coverage of US NSA mass electronic spying programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27029670

This year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced earlier this afternoon:

FICTION: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

DRAMA: Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis

HISTORY: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn

BIOGRAPHY: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer

POETRY: Digest by Gregory Pardlo

GENERAL NONFICTION: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Here are the lists of finalists in each category:

Fiction:
Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford
The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami
Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates

Drama:
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks
Marjorie Prime by Jordan Harrison

History:
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker

Biography or Autobiography:
Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers
Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin

Poetry:
Reel to Reel by Alan Shapiro
Compass Rose by Arthur Sze

General Nonfiction:
No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

http://www.pulitzer.org/node/8501

You left out the Poetry finalist Reel to Reel by Alan Shapiro

Thanks, Bergs. I left out a quotation mark in the link I posted for that book, and as a result it didn't appear when I posted the link.

The winners and finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced earlier this afternoon. The winning books are in bold in each category.

Fiction:
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Get in Trouble: Stories, by Kelly Link,
Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

General Non-Fiction:
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran by Carla Power

Biography or Autobiography:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles
The Light of the World: A Memoir by Elizabeth Alexander

History:
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles
Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War by Brian Matthew Jordan
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Poetry:
Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian
Alive: New and Selected Poems by Elizabeth Willis
Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss

Drama:
Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
The Humans by Stephen Karam

The winners and finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced April 15, 2019.

Fiction:

The Overstory, by Richard Powers (WINNER)
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
There There, by Tommy Orange

General Non-Fiction:

Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold (WINNER)
In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers, by Bernice Yeung
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush

Biography or Autobiography:
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, by Jeffrey C. Stewart (WINNER)
Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris, by Caroline Weber
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, by Max Boot

History:
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (WINNER)
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson
Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Poetry:
Be With, by Forrest Gander (WINNER)
feeld, by Jos Charles
Like, by A. E. Stallings

Drama:
Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury (WINNER)
Dance Nation, by Clare Barron
What the Constitution Means to Me, by Heidi Schreck

Pulitzer Prizes 2020

Drama: A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson

Finalists: Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery,
Soft Power by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori

History: Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel

Finalists: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Biography: Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

Finalists: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer,
Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, And Me by Deirdre Bair

Poetry: The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Finalists: Dunce by Mary Ruefle,
Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux

General Nonfiction: The Undying: Pain Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care by Anne Boyer and
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Finalists: Elderhood: Refining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson,
Solitary by Albert Woodfox and Leslie George

Fiction: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Finalists: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett,
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Nickel Boys was my fave read from last year. I sent it off in a rotating book club. Interesting pick.
I've been wanting to read Topeka School for a while, but my local bookstore that I wanted to support has been closed down during covid.

The other winners and finalists aren't familiar to me, but I primarily read fiction.

Pulitzer Prizes 2021

Fiction
The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich
FINALISTS
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason
Telephone, by Percival Everett

History:
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, by Marcia Chatelain
FINALISTS:
The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini
The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, by Megan Kate Nelson

Biography:
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by the late Les Payne and Tamara Payne
FINALISTS:
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by Amy Stanley

Poetry:
Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz
FINALISTS:
A Treatise on Stars, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché

General Nonfiction:
Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino
FINALISTS:
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country, by Sierra Crane Murdoch

Drama:
The Hot Wing King, by Katori Hall
FINALISTS:
Circle Jerk, by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley
Stew, by Zora Howard

Pulitzer Prize 2022

Fiction
Winner:
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
Finalist:
Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman
Palmares by Gayl Jones

History
Winners:
Covered with Night by Nicole Eustace
Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer
Finalist:
Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur

Biography
Winner:
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly
Finalists:
Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura

Poetry
Winner:
frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
Finalists:
Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten by Will Alexander
Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang

General Nonfiction
Winner:
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott
Finalists:
Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism by Carla Power
The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager

Pulitzer Prize 2023

FICTION

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

Finalist:

The Immortal King Rao, by Vauhini Vara

HISTORY

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie

Finalists:

Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, by Michael John Witgen

Watergate: A New History, by Garrett M. Graff

BIOGRAPHY

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage

Finalists:

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, by Jennifer Homans

MEMOIR or AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Stay True, by Hua Hsu

Finalists:

Easy Beauty: A Memoir, by Chloé Cooper Jones

The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

POETRY

Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020, by Carl Phillips

Finalists:

Blood Snow, by dg nanouk okpik

Still Life, by the late Jay Hopler

GENERAL NONFICTION

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

Finalists:

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu

Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, by David George Haskell

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, by Linda Villarosa