Bestsellers

New York Times Advice

Award Winners

National Book Awards,
2007

Pulitzer Prize Winners

Other Hot Picks

Recommended Reading and Viewing

Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2006

Who started the Pulitzer Prize? Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant who came to the United States in the 1860s to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War. In 1868, he became a reporter for a German language newspaper in St. Louis. He had a very successful career as a correspondent, and then in 1878 he bought two St. Louis newspapers. By the end of the 1880s he had made a fortune, and had become one of the most powerful newspaper owners in the country. Pulitzer died in 1911, and his will provided $2 million for Columbia University to establish the graduate school of journalism, and awards to recognize excellence in journalism, letters, drama, and education.

The prizewinners for fiction have ranged from the classic such as The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway in 1953, to the popular such as Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry in 1986. Each year, we eagerly await the announcement of the winners and finalists for the awards in literature. Here are the books chosen for 2006:

Fiction 

Winner:
March by Geraldine Brooks

Finalists:
The March by E. L. Doctorow
The Bright Forever by Lee Martin

History

Winner:
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky

Finalists:
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean
Wilentz

Biography

Winner:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Finalist:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American
Romanticism by Megan Marshall

Poetry

Winner:
Late Wife by Claudia Emerson

General Nonfiction

Winner:
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins

Finalist:
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
The Assassins’ Gate: American in Iraq by George Packer