The Pulitzer Prize is administered every year by Columbia University
as an award for excellence in journalism, letters, and music. The award
began in 1917 at the behest of publisher Joseph Pulitzer. I look forward
to the announcement of Pulitzer winners in the category of letters
every year; however, it was with an excess of enthusiasm that I awaited
the decision on the prize for fiction. Not only was one of my favorite
books of last year,
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, nominated
for the award but there was a major controversy within this category
last year. The judges decided not to award any of the three nominees in
the fiction category with a prize. The literary world was up in arms!
So, I have been waiting for this year's results anxiously. I was
thrilled when I heard that Adam Johnson's book had won; having a book
that I have championed and recommended to many customers win the prize
was exciting.
Prize for Biography
Tom Reiss'
The Black Count is a story that seems too fantastic to be real. Alex
Dumas was born in Haiti from the union of a slave woman and a French
nobleman on the run from the crown. He lived briefly as a slave but
eventually travelled to Paris rising through the ranks of the military
and joing the French aristocracy. The novels of his son, Alexandre
Dumas, immortalized his life, but until Reiss work very little of the
elder Dumas has been known.
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution,
Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo is peopled with the
swashbuckling rogues we've come to expect in adventure novels, but it
also tells a greater story of race, revolution, and fatherhood.
Prize for History
The
body of literature surrounding the Vietnam war is huge, but
Embers of War by Fredrik Logevall looks at the war differenly than most of the
works we have seen by soldiers and historians. What surprised me most
about Logevall's book is the fact that it studies the years 1919 to
1959. The American idea of the Vietnam War usually has it taking place
between the years of 1955 to 1975, so it becomes clear immediately that
Logevall wants to tell a different story. Logevall looks at
historical records to determine the missteps and
miscalculations that all culminated in the disaster of war.
Prize for Poetry
Marriage
is, to me, the idea that you are everything to just one other person.
To lose that person through death or divorce is a struggle that I cannot
imagine. In Sharon Olds new collection,
Stag's Leap, she writes of her
husband leaving her for another woman after thirty years. Olds opening
herself to pain, fear, and renewal makes for a powerful collection of
poems.
Prize for Nonfiction
With many great
historical figures their life as a whole tends to overshadow the
independent aspects. That Thurgood Marshall was the first
African-American Supreme Court Justice will forever be the first thing
associated with his long and influencial life. In
Devil in the Grove
Gilbert King takes us years before that appointment and even before the
landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education to show Marshall fighting
for the life of a young man accused of a murder he did not commit. A man
like Thurgood Marshall is not greater than the sum of his parts; it is
his striving toward greatness in all things that made him the man he
was. It is the in our battles both large and small that we become who we
are.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the
Dawn of a New America is a story about one man's battle for life,
another man's battle for justice, and the battle for equality in
America.
Prize for Fiction
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
pulled me in so many directions. First there are the horrors of life
in North Korea which are almost hard to believe. Then there is the
truth of politics and fear mongering and the realization that no one
is too far from this sort of life. And finally there is the will of
the human spirit, the inevitability of death, and the question of
just how much one can take. This novel is very well written and very,
very intense. It was often hard to read but I could never put it
down. I was completely invested in the lives of Jun Do and Sun Moon.
