Pulitzer Prize winners Archives

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

When I first read Pilgrim as a college freshman, I’d never encountered anything like Dillard’s genre-defying reflections on the changing seasons in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. This is a book that changed my life.

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

by Gilbert King

This meticulously researched and superbly written nonfiction work tells the story of Thurgood Marshall and his crucial involvement in one of the most important and controversial Civil Rights cases of the 1950s. King's fascinating constellation of topics includes the Jim Crow South, Florida's citrus industry, the inner workings of the NAACP, the FBI, and Thurgood Marshall's legal career.

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

This big, fat, Pulitzer-winning novel has been on my radar for years, so I chose it as one of my 2016 Reading Challenge picks to inspire myself to finally cross it off the list. It's not the kind of book I expected to love: the story revolves around a 3000 mile cattle drive from a dusty Texas border town to the unsettled lands of Montana in the 1880s. Yet I enjoyed it so much. I listened to the audio version of this one (all 36 hours of it—although thankfully at 1.5x speed it didn't take *quite* that long).

Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

I'm currently making my way through Chernow's massive Hamilton biography—the one that inspired the musical—and Chernow can write. This is the next big fat historical biography on my list. If you love Doris Kearns Goodwin, you'll love Chernow.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

This work from Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Genius grant recipient Desmond is one of the latest award winners. With painstaking detail, Desmond takes his reader into the heart of Milwaukee, illuminating current economic and sociological conditions through the lens of eight different families on the edge, and the conditions that are undoing them. Heartbreaking, powerful, eye-opening.

Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

I love Lahiri and reading the description (and excellent reviews) on this collection makes me want to bump it to the top of my list. From Publishers Weekly: "Lahiri's touch in these nine tales is delicate, but her observations remain damningly accurate, and her bittersweet stories are unhampered by nostalgia."

March

by Geraldine Brooks

From the publisher: "From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction." Add Audible narration for $9.99.

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Morrison delivers one of the most unsettling, haunting, and macabre stories in the American canon. The story begins in a haunted Ohio home where we meet Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery and fled north. Followed around every corner by the ghost of her baby, Sethe’s attempts to begin a new life are thwarted at every turn—most of all when a young woman shows up at her door bearing the same name as the ghost baby's headstone: Beloved. Since Toni Morrison narrates her own iconic work, I enjoyed simultaneously listening to the audiobook and reading the physical copy, simply to catch the brilliance of the author’s craft. Content warnings apply.

The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

From the publisher: "One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life--from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death."

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker

An incredible modern classic. From The Nation: “The Color Purple is about the struggle between redemption and revenge. And the chief agency of redemption, Walker is saying, is the strength of the relationships between women: their friendships, their love, their shared expression."

Pulitzer Prize winners

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