The Pulitzer Prize Winners 2003
The Pulitzer Prizes, among the top literary and journalism awards in the United States, were dominated by themes of politics and war this year.
FICTION
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
(From the book jacket)
Also nominated :
"Servants of the Map: Stories" by Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton)
"You Are Not a Stranger Here" by Adam Haslett (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
DRAMA
Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz
Anna in the tropics is a play set in Ybor City, (Tampa), Florida in 1930. The romantic drama deals with a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression.
(From the New Theater Web site)
Also nominated :
"The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" by Edward Albee
"Take Me Out" by Richard Greenberg.
HISTORY
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt and Company)
The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. Now, sixty years after America joined this titanic struggle, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943.
(From the book jacket)
Also nominated :
"At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America" by Philip Dray (Random House), "Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America" by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Alfred A. Knopf).
BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf)
Master of the Senate carries Lyndon Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. The result is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself the titan of Capitol Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings of personal and legislative power.
(From the book jacket)
Also nominated :
"The Fly Swatter" by Nicholas Dawidoff (Pantheon Books)
"Beethoven: The Music and the Life" by Lewis Lockwood (W.W. Norton).
POETRY
Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
(From the book jacket)
Also nominated :
"Music Like Dirt" by Frank Bidart (Sarabande Books)
"Hazmat" by J.D. McClatchy (Alfred A. Knopf).
GENERAL NON-FICTION
"A Problem From Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (Basic Books)
"A Problem from Hell" is a path-breaking interrogation of the last century of American history. Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, access to thousands of pages of newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power shows how those who urged U.S. action were thwarted again and again by ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination.
(From the book jacket)
Also nominated :
"The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit" by Ellen Meloy (Pantheon Books)
"The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker (Viking).
MUSIC
On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams (Boosey & Hawkes)
Premiered by the New York Philharmonic on September 19, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall.
When the New York Philharmonic asked John Adams to create a musical commemoration for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, to be premiered a year after the tragic events, it must have seemed one of the most challenging commissions in the history of music, whether in terms of subject, timescale or expectations. Adams responded with, On the Transmigration of Souls, a work that is neither an official public memorial, nor a personalised response, but rather what he describes as "a memory space a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions".
(from Boosey & Hawkes Web site)
Also nominated :
"Three Tales" by Steve Reich, premiered on May 31, 2002 at the Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, SC (Boosey & Hawkes)
"Camp Songs" by Paul Schoenfield, commissioned by Music of Remembrance and premiered on April 7, 2002 at MOR's Holocaust Remembrance concert, Not In Vain!, at Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
Newspaper Prizes
PUBLIC SERVICE
Boston Globe for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.