And the Winners Are....

Today is Pulitzer Prize announcement day. The big news will no doubt be the decision not to award a prize in fiction for the first time since 1977.

But of greater interest to this blog are three of the awards that were given.

The Pulitzer Prize in Biography went to John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life.


The Pulitzer Prize in History went to the late Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which, in an unusual move, was originally nominated for the biography prize and moved over to History by the Pulitzer Board.

And the winner for General Nonfiction was Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Though Greenblatt is of course a literary scholar, this book, on the impact of the 15th-century re-discovery of Lucretius's De rerum natura, is the most intellectual history-oriented of the bunch.

I'm sorry to say that I haven't read any of these three books yet. Each is of some interest to me, though all are rather far removed from anything I'm working on at the moment.

Consider this an open thread to discuss the Pulitzer winners...and any even worthier books from the last year that you feel might have been overlooked.