eBranch Blog

April 11, 2005

2005 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday, April 4. The following are the Pulitzer Prize winners for Letters & Drama

Biography or Autobiography

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. de Kooning: An American Master
Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true ?painter?s painter? whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture.

Fiction

Marilynne Robinson. Gilead
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. He tells of the tension between his father and grandfather and he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton.

General Nonfiction

Steve Coll. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Ghost Wars answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of September 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail?

History

David Hackett Fischer. Washington's Crossing
Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost 90 percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states.Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington -- and many other Americans -- refused to let the Revolution die.

Poetry

Ted Kooser. Delights & Shadows
For more than thirty years Ted Kooser has written poems that deftly bring dissimilar things into telling unities. Throughout a long and distinguished writing career he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making a poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor. A gyroscope balanced between a child's hands, a jar of buttons that recalls generations of women, and a bird briefly witnessed outside a window -- each reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world.

Drama

John Patrick Shanley. Doubt, a Parable