The Pulitzer Prize is an U.S. award for achievements in newspaper journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City. Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories.
JPL owns copies of each of the winning titles below.
The 2009 winners for literature are!
Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Hell. We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone, says Olive Kitteridge, redoubtable seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. Anyone who gets in Olive’s way had better watch out, for she crashes unapologetically through life like an emotional storm trooper. She forces her husband, Henry, the town pharmacist, into tactical retreat; and she drives her beloved son, Christopher, across the country and into therapy. But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this novel in stories. Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope. People are sustained by the rhythms of ordinary life and the natural wonders of coastal Maine, and even Olive is sometimes caught off guard by life’s baffling beauty. Strout is also the author of the well-received Amy and Isabelle (1999) and Abide with Me (2006). Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In the long-awaited sequel to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed delivers a powerful composite portrait of the African American family whose labors helped make Jefferson's Virginia residence a fountainhead of American culture. Primary interest naturally attaches to Sally Hemings, the gifted black woman who chose?at age 16?to live as Jefferson's enslaved mistress in America rather than as a free woman in France. But Gordon-Reed highlights the family role of Sally's mother, Elizabeth Hemings, whose experience in bearing children to both black and white fathers schooled her in the racial dynamics of early America. Biracial relationships immensely complicated life at Monticello, where the Virginia planter famous for declaring the equality of all men counted among his slaves four of his own children, fathered in a union he never publicly acknowledged. Gordon-Reed teases out telling clues from correspondence and journals of the Hemingses' struggle for dignity despite the cruel constraints of slavery. That Jefferson finally freed his children by Sally does not obscure those restraints, nor does it hide the tragedy visited upon other Monticello slaves when Jefferson's posthumous debts licensed the auctioneer to break up black families to increase their market value. A must-have acquisition for every American history collection. Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.
Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)
Booklist Reviews
There are numerous books on the seventh president, but this one is distinguished by its particularly fluid presentation. As the subtitle indicates, it has special appeal for those readers who may be uninterested in a complete cradle-to-grave treatment but are looking for a particular focus on the Jackson presidency. The “evolution of presidential power” is the basic theme around which Meacham constructs his riveting account of the freshness Jackson brought to the White House—meaning, before his advent into the chief executive office, political power was considered to be best left in the hands of the landed elite, but Jackson believed in the “primacy of the will of the common people,” and during his administration, “democracy was making its stand.” This was a difficult time for the American republic; the issue of slavery was developing into a major political issue, and with that, the rise of southern questioning of just how strong the union of states was and what rights individual states possessed to safeguard regional interests. But Jackson administered the ship of state with good instincts and wisdom. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
Booklist Reviews
With no punctuation and a solitary launching capital letter, Merwin's elegant poems are built to the measure of breath and sweep the page like palm fronds. Yet each word is old, lustrous, and solid. Only a poet as seasoned as Merwin can wrest so much meaning from dark, moon, wake, river, and song. The questions he poses are as old as night, and the answers are forever elusive. The contrast between airiness and earthiness is intrinsic to master poet Merwin's newest poems, lithe works steely in their testing of the mesh of memory and sensuousness; the coil of time, our continuing fiction; and the ripple of shadows attendant upon the brightest star, the most radiant life. Childhood reminiscences summon the dead and recall the now obsolete; the underworld masquerades as a coal mine or a shadow without form or the darkness that is the mind of day. And Merwin contemplates the earth's verdant singularity in the vault of darkness, our entreaties straying far out past the orbits and webs. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)
PW Reviews
Wall Street Journal bureau chief Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to “commercial interests” between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined vagrancy or even “changing employers without permission.” The initial sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, “reserved almost exclusively for black men,” was a form of slavery in one of “hundreds of forced labor camps” operated “by state and county governments, large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers.” Into this history, Blackmon weaves the story of Green Cottenham, who was “charged with riding a freight train without a ticket,” in 1908 and was sentenced to “three months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,” a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Cottenham's sentence was extended an additional three months and six days because he was unable to pay fines then leveraged on criminals. Blackmon's book reveals in devastating detail the legal and commercial forces that created this neoslavery along with deeply moving and totally appalling personal testimonies of survivors. “Every incident in this book is true,” he writes; one wishes it were not so. (Mar.)
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