Wikipedia

Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir[1] by an American author or co-authors, published during the preceding calendar year. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year.[2]

Winners

In its first 97 years to 2013, the Biography Pulitzer was awarded 97 times. Two were given in 1938, none in 1962.[3]

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

Entries from this point on include the finalists listed after the winner for each year.

  • 1980: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  • 1981: Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
    • Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan
    • Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel
  • 1982: Grant: A Biography by William S. McFeely
  • 1983: Growing Up by Russell Baker
    • Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874–1915 by Ted Morgan
    • Thomas E. Dewey and His Times by Richard Norton Smith
  • 1984: Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 by Louis R. Harlan
    • Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just by Kenneth Manning
    • Thomas Carlyle: A Biography by Fred Kaplan
  • 1985: The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman
    • Becoming William James by Howard M. Feinstein
    • The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott
  • 1986: Louise Bogan: A Portrait by Elizabeth Frank
    • A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent, 1942–1945 by Frida Scheps Weinstein
    • George Washington Williams: A Biography by John Hope Franklin
  • 1987: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David J. Garrow
    • Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 by Joseph Frank
    • Murrow: His Life and Times by A.M. Sperber
    • The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams by Leonard L. Richards
  • 1988: Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe by David Herbert Donald
    • George Santayana: A Biography by John Owen McCormick
    • Hemingway by Kenneth S. Lynn
  • 1989: Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

1990s

2000s

  • 2000: Vera, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov by Stacy Schiff
  • 2001: W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis
    • Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
    • The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands
  • 2002: John Adams by David McCullough
  • 2003: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
    • Beethoven: The Music and the Life by Lewis Lockwood
    • The Fly Swatter by Nicholas Dawidoff
  • 2004: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
    • Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work by Hayden Herrera
    • Isaac Newton by James Gleick
  • 2005: de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
    • Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America by William Souder
    • Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
  • 2006: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
  • 2007: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
    • Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw
    • John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty by Arthur H. Cash
  • 2008: Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson
  • 2009: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
    • The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll
    • Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands

2010s

  • 2010: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
    • Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
    • Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper, Jr.
  • 2011: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
    • Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon by Michael O'Brien
    • The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley
  • 2012: George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
    • Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
    • Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel
  • 2013: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
    • Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra
    • The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw
  • 2014: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall
    • Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch
    • Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber
  • 2015: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer[5]
    • Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers
    • Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 by Stephen Kotkin
  • 2016: 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
  • 2017: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar[6]
    • In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi
    • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
  • 2018: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser[7]
    • Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
    • Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison
  • 2019: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart[8]
    • 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

2020s

  • 2020: Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser[9]
    • 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

Repeat winners

Ten people have won the Pulitzer for Biography or Autobiography twice:

W. A. Swanberg was selected by the Pulitzer board in 1962 and 1973; however, the trustees of Columbia University (then responsible for conferral of the awards) overturned the proposed 1962 prize for Citizen Hearst.[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Biography: Prize Winners by Category". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved May 31, 2019.
  2. ^ "1917 Winners". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-12-19.
  3. ^ "Biography or Autobiography". The Pulitzer Prizes (pulitzer.org). Retrieved 2008-10-01.
  4. ^ a b In 1962 the Pulitzer board awarded the prize to W.A. Swanberg for Citizen Hearst. The trustees of Columbia University, who administer the prize, overturned the award, refusing to honor a book that took a critical look at William Randolph Hearst. McDowell, Edwin (May 11, 1984). "Publishing: Pulitzer Controversies". The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2020.
  5. ^ "Biography or Autobiography". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 20 April 2015.
  6. ^ "Biography or Autobiography". Retrieved 11 April 2017.
  7. ^ "2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners". www.pulitzer.org.
  8. ^ "2019 Pulitzer Prize Winners". www.pulitzer.org.
  9. ^ "2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners". www.pulitzer.org.

External links

  • Media related to Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners at Wikimedia Commons
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