2008 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama, and Music

NYT
April 7, 2008
2008 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. Following are the winners in Letters, Drama and Music.

HISTORY: DANIEL WALKER HOWE
"What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848"

Mr. Howe, 71, is an emeritus professor of history at Oxford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In over 900 pages, Professor Howe creates a panoramic tale of the formative period of American history, when the country expanded and created innovations in communications and transportation.

FINALISTS "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" by Robert Dallek and "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" by the late David Halberstam.

BIOGRAPHY: JOHN MATTESON
"Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father"

Louisa May Alcott is widely known, but Professor Matteson, 47, an associate professor of English at John Jay College in New York City, turned his attention to her father, Bronson Alcott. He was a teacher and lecturer, a friend of both Emerson and Thoreau and the seeker of a utopian community.

“I found him very inspirational,” Professor Matteson said. “He was almost completely self-taught.”

FINALISTS "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" by Martin Duberman and "The Life of Kingsley Amis" by Zachary Leader.

FICTION: JUNOT DIAZ
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

Mr. Diaz, 39, arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1974, not speaking or reading English. His riotous novel tells the story of a family of Dominican immigrants, both in the present in New Jersey and in the past in the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Diaz said he kicked around the idea for his first novel for about four years and then spent seven years writing it. “In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself,” he said.

FINALISTS "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson and "Shakespeare’s Kitchen" by Lore Segal.



GENERAL NONFICTION: SAUL FRIEDLANDER
"The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"

In his second volume of a history of the Holocaust, Mr. Friedländer, 75, interwove segments from contemporary journals and letters into the more general description of the atrocities. “Usually the history of the Holocaust is written from the viewpoint of German documents and archives,” said Mr. Friedländer, who was born in Prague, escaped to France in 1939 and emigrated to Israel in 1948. He teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

FINALISTS "The Cigarette Century" by Allan Brandt and "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" by Alex Ross.



DRAMA: TRACY LETTS
"August: Osage County"

FINALISTS "Yellow Face" by David Henry Hwang and "Dying City" by Christopher Shinn.



POETRY: ROBERT HASS AND PHILIP SCHULTZ
"Time and Materials," by Robert Hass and "Failure," by Philip Schultz

In his sixth volume of poetry, Mr. Hass, 67, a former poet laureate, wrote about large subjects of international import, like global warming, as well as more personal verse in an exploration of the role of public and private life. Mr. Hass also won the National Book Award for poetry last year.

Mr. Schultz, 63, found inspiration for his fifth volume of poetry in finally discussing the death of his father when Mr. Schultz was 18 and the family business fell apart. “It was a hole that I was digging myself out of the rest of my life,” he said. Mr. Schultz runs the Writers Studio in New York.

FINALIST "Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006" by Ellen Bryant Voigt.


MUSIC: DAVID LANG
"The Little Match Girl Passion"

Mr. Lang, 51, is co-founder of Bang on a Can, the boundary-crossing new music collective. His Pulitzer-winning work is for a quartet of singers. It is an eerie, poignant and tragic melding of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a poor child who freezes to death and the text of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”

FINALISTS "Meanwhile" by Stephen Hartke and "Concerto for Viola" by Roberto Sierra.


SPECIAL CITATIONS: BOB DYLAN