The winners of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today
by sernabad
Elizabeth Strout won the Fiction prize for Olive Kitteridge, her novel about a strong-willed, distasteful woman, and her potent effects on her family and neighbors.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, follows up her popular Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997). Continuing her meticulous research, Gordon-Reed tries to untangle the very complicated family ties and issues that bound Jefferson and Hemings to each other and to history.
John Meacham’s much in-demand biography, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, grabbed the Biography prize. Jackson was transformational because he believed that presidential power should shift from the landed elite to the power of the common people.
Continuing the focus on race relations throughout American history, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon, captured the General Non-fiction category. Few kenw that convicts were sold to industries in the 20th century to provide manpower.
The Poetry prize went to the lovely collection of W.S Merwin in The Shadow of Sirius, whose interesting hook – no punctuation and one capital letter – is just one fascinating element in his poems.
For the full list of prizes, including one to The Detroit Free Press for its success in prying loose Mayor Kilpatrick’s shocking text message communications with his Chief of Staff, go to the Pulitzer Prize website.
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