Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published during the preceding calendar year that is ineligible for any other Pulitzer Prize. The Prize has been awarded since 1962; beginning in 1980, one to three finalists have been announced alongside the winner.[1]
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Recipients
Since its inception in 1962, the Prize for General Nonfiction has been awarded 66 times.[1] An additional one to three finalists have been announced alongside the winner beginning in 1980. Two authors have won multiple prizes: Barbara W. Tuchman in 1963 and 1972, and Edward O. Wilson in 1979 and 1991. Additionally, two authors have been finalists multiple times: Steven Pinker (1998, 2003) and John McPhee (1982, 1987, 1991); McPhee won the Prize in 1999. Three winning works were also finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for History: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (1989),[2] Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills (1993),[3] and The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin (2020).[4]
Barbara W. Tuchman won the Prize in 1963 for her book on World War I, and again in 1972 for her work on early 20th-century China.
Edward O. Wilson has won the Prize twice for his books on biology: once in 1979, and again in 1991 in collaboration with Bert Hölldobler.
John McPhee was a Prize finalist three times in 1982, 1987, and 1991, before winning in 1999.
| Year | Author(s) | Book | Award |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1962 | Theodore H. White | The Making of the President 1960 | Winner |
| 1963 | Barbara W. Tuchman | The Guns of August | Winner |
| 1964 | Richard Hofstadter | Anti-intellectualism in American Life | Winner |
| 1965 | Howard Mumford Jones | O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years | Winner |
| 1966 | Edwin Way Teale | Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter | Winner |
| 1967 | David Brion Davis | The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture | Winner |
| 1968 | Will Durant and Ariel Durant | The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution | Winner |
| 1969 | René Jules Dubos | So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events | Winner |
| Norman Mailer | The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History | Winner | |
| 1970 | Erik H. Erikson | Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence | Winner |
| 1971 | John Toland | The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 | Winner |
| 1972 | Barbara W. Tuchman | Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 | Winner |
| 1973 | Robert Coles | Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III | Winner |
| Frances FitzGerald | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | Winner | |
| 1974 | Ernest Becker | The Denial of Death | Winner |
| 1975 | Annie Dillard | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Winner |
| 1976 | Robert N. Butler | Why Survive? Being Old in America | Winner |
| 1977 | William W. Warner | Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay | Winner |
| 1978 | Carl Sagan | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Winner |
| 1979 | Edward O. Wilson | On Human Nature | Winner |
| 1980 | Douglas R. Hofstadter | Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | Winner |
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar | The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination | Finalist | |
| Lewis Thomas | The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher | Finalist | |
| 1981 | Carl E. Schorske | Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture | Winner |
| Maxine Hong Kingston | China Men | Finalist | |
| William Manchester | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War | Finalist | |
| Marshall Frady | Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey | Finalist | |
| 1982 | Tracy Kidder | The Soul of a New Machine | Winner |
| John McPhee | Basin and Range | Finalist | |
| Diana Trilling | Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor | Finalist | |
| 1983 | Susan Sheehan | Is There No Place on Earth for Me? | Winner |
| Diane Johnson | Terrorists and Novelists | Finalist | |
| Jonathan Schell | The Fate of the Earth | Finalist | |
| 1984 | Paul Starr | The Social Transformation of American Medicine | Winner |
| Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer | Conversations with the Enemy | Finalist | |
| Susan Jacoby | Wild Justice | Finalist | |
| 1985 | Studs Terkel | The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two | Winner |
| Donald Keene | Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era | Finalist | |
| Jonathan Kwitny | Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World | Finalist | |
| 1986 | J. Anthony Lukas | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | Winner |
| Joseph Lelyveld | Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White | Winner | |
| Robert N. Bellah | Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life | Finalist | |
| 1987 | David K. Shipler | Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land | Winner |
| Cyra McFadden | Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | Finalist | |
| John McPhee | Rising from the Plains | Finalist | |
| 1988 | Richard Rhodes | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Winner |
| James Gleick | Chaos: Making a New Science | Finalist | |
| Daniel Callahan | Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society | Finalist | |
| 1989 | Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Winner |
| Timothy Ferris | Coming of Age in the Milky Way | Finalist | |
| McGeorge Bundy | Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years | Finalist | |
| Howard Kohn | The Last Farmer | Finalist | |
| 1990 | Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson | And Their Children After Them | Winner |
| David Fromkin | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 | Finalist | |
| Stephen Jay Gould | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | Finalist | |
| 1991 | Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson | The Ants | Winner |
| John McPhee | Looking for a Ship | Finalist | |
| William duBuys and Alex Harris | River of Traps: A Village Life | Finalist | |
| 1992 | Daniel Yergin | The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power | Winner |
| Andre Dubus | Broken Vessels | Finalist | |
| Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall | Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics | Finalist | |
| 1993 | Garry Wills | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Winner |
| Susan Griffin | A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War | Finalist | |
| Richard Rodriguez | Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father | Finalist | |
| Anne Matthews | Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains | Finalist | |
| 1994 | David Remnick | Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | Winner |
| Peter Gay | The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud | Finalist | |
| John Lukacs | The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age | Finalist | |
| 1995 | Jonathan Weiner | The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time | Winner |
| Sherwin B. Nuland | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Finalist | |
| John Berendt | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story | Finalist | |
| 1996 | Tina Rosenberg | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism | Winner |
| Daniel C. Dennett | Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life | Finalist | |
| Lawrence Weschler | Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology | Finalist | |
| 1997 | Richard Kluger | Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | Winner |
| Cynthia Ozick | Fame and Folly | Finalist | |
| Samuel G. Freedman | The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond | Finalist | |
| 1998 | Jared Diamond | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Winner |
| Steven Pinker | How the Mind Works | Finalist | |
| Jon Krakauer | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | Finalist | |
| 1999 | John McPhee | Annals of the Former World | Winner |
| Elliott Currie | Crime and Punishment in America | Finalist | |
| Judith Rich Harris | The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do | Finalist | |
| 2000 | John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | Winner |
| Scott Weidensaul | Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds | Finalist | |
| Brian Greene | The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory | Finalist | |
| 2001 | Herbert P. Bix | Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan | Winner |
| Dave Eggers | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Finalist | |
| Ted Conover | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | Finalist | |
| 2002 | Diane McWhorter | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | Winner |
| Andrew Solomon | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression | Finalist | |
| David Halberstam | War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals | Finalist | |
| 2003 | Samantha Power | "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Winner |
| Ellen Meloy | The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit | Finalist | |
| Steven Pinker | The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | Finalist | |
| 2004 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag: A History | Winner |
| Steven Nadler | Rembrandt's Jews | Finalist | |
| Dana Priest | The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military | Finalist | |
| 2005 | Steve Coll | Ghost Wars | Winner |
| Suketu Mehta | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | Finalist | |
| Luis Alberto Urrea | The Devil's Highway: A True Story | Finalist | |
| 2006 | Caroline Elkins | Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya | Winner |
| Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Finalist | |
| George Packer | The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq | Finalist | |
| 2007 | Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Winner |
| Pete Earley | Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness | Finalist | |
| Thomas E. Ricks | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Finalist | |
| 2008 | Saul Friedländer | The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 | Winner |
| Allan Brandt | The Cigarette Century | Finalist | |
| Alex Ross | The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Finalist | |
| 2009 | Douglas A. Blackmon | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II | Winner |
| Arthur Herman | Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age | Finalist | |
| William I. Hitchcock | The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe | Finalist | |
| 2010 | David E. Hoffman | The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy | Winner |
| John Cassidy | How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities | Finalist | |
| Robert Wright | The Evolution of God | Finalist | |
| 2011 | Siddhartha Mukherjee | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Winner |
| S.C. Gwynne | Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History | Finalist | |
| Nicholas G. Carr | The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains | Finalist | |
| 2012 | Stephen Greenblatt | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Winner |
| Diane Ackerman | One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing | Finalist | |
| Mara Hvistendahl | Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men | Finalist | |
| 2013 | Gilbert King | Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America | Winner |
| Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Finalist | |
| David George Haskell | The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature | Finalist | |
| 2014 | Dan Fagin | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | Winner |
| Gary J. Bass | The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide | Finalist | |
| Fred Kaplan | The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War | Finalist | |
| 2015 | Elizabeth Kolbert | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Winner |
| Evan Osnos | Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China | Finalist | |
| Anand Gopal | No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes | Finalist | |
| 2016 | Joby Warrick | Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS | Winner |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates | Between the World and Me | Finalist | |
| Carla Power | If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran | Finalist | |
| 2017 | Matthew Desmond | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Winner |
| John Donvan and Caren Zucker | In a Different Key: The Story of Autism | Finalist | |
| Micki McElya | The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery | Finalist | |
| 2018 | James Forman Jr. | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America | Winner |
| Suzy Hansen | Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World | Finalist | |
| Richard O. Prum | The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us | Finalist | |
| 2019 | Eliza Griswold | Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America | Winner |
| Bernice Yeung | In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers | Finalist | |
| Elizabeth Rush | Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore | Finalist | |
| 2020 | Greg Grandin | The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America | Winner |
| Anne Boyer | The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care | Winner | |
| Louise Aronson | Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life | Finalist | |
| Albert Woodfox with Leslie George | Solitary | Finalist | |
| 2021 | David Zucchino | Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy | Winner |
| Cathy Park Hong | Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning | Finalist | |
| Sierra Crane Murdoch | Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country | Finalist | |
| 2022 | Andrea Elliott | Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City | Winner |
| Carla Power | Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism | Finalist | |
| Joshua Prager | The Family Roe: An American Story | Finalist | |
| 2023 | Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa | His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice | Winner |
| Jing Tsu | Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern | Finalist | |
| David George Haskell | Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction | Finalist | |
| Linda Villarosa | Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation | Finalist | |
References
- "General Nonfiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on March 18, 2021. Retrieved March 24, 2021.
- "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan (Random House)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 26, 2021.
- "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 26, 2021.
- "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on May 4, 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners.
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