Feature Articles

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes
by Todd Doherty, Book Processing

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The Pulitzer Prizes, established by Joseph Pulitzer and administered by Columbia University, have been awarded annually since 1917. They recognize excellence in journalism, arts and letters, and are among the most esteemed awards in the literary and journalistic spheres.

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The 2007 History Pulitzer was awarded to Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, who collaborated to produce The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Their work describes an America that has continued to practice segregation well into the present day, and how the press took up the mantle of civil rights in order to combat it.

The Race Beat goes behind the headlines, using private correspondence and unpublished pieces to show the inner workings of the Fourth Estate's battles for equality.

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Gene Roberts is best known as having been the executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer for eighteen years, and is credited with placing that newspaper into a place of prominence. The investigative team of Jim Steele and Don Bartlett, themselves twice-winners of the Pulitzer Award, worked there under his watch. Hank Klibanoff has been the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 2002.

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Debby Applegate won the Biography prize for her work, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. She used her research from the past two decades to detail the life of Henry Ward Beecher, the son of a Puritan minister and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Pushed into the ministry himself, he became involved in many "hot-button" issues of his day, from anti-slavery movements to Darwinism to politics, and was well renowned for his sense of humor. All this ended when he was accused of having an affair with one of his parishioners.

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Debby Applegate began her research on Beecher while attending Amherst College, from where she graduated summa cum laude in 1989. She continued at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D. in American Studies in 1998.

The Fiction Pulitzer went to Cormac McCarthy for his science-fiction novel, The Road. In his story, a father and son inhabit a post-apocalyptic world, two of the last survivors of some unnamed cataclysm. As they wander, scavenging to live, they face constant perils from the weather, starvation and other survivors. This cautionary fable is described by the New York Times as having a "stunning, savage beauty" in its bleak landscape.

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The Road is Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel. His first novel, The Orchid Keeper appeared in 1965.

Lawrence Wright won the General Nonfiction award for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In this work, he retells the tragedy of September 11th while focusing on four figures: Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri; John O’Neill, former FBI anti-terrorism expert who died in the 9/11 attacks; and Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency.

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Lawrence Wright graduated from Tulane University, and received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the American University in Cairo. He worked as a journalist for several years, joining the New Yorker in 1992. The Looming Tower is his sixth book.

Other Pulitzer winners include David Lindsay-Abaire, who received the Drama prize for his play, Rabbit Hole; Poetry prize winner Natasha Trethewey for the collection Native Guard; and Music prize recipient jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, for his CD Sound Grammar.

Below is a list of the Pulitzer Prize winning titles. For your convenience, this list is also available in a MS Excel spreadsheet. click here.

LOOMING TOWER: AL-QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11.