eBranch Blog

May 02, 2006

2006 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday, April 17. The following are the Pulitzer Prize winners for Letters & Drama

Biography or Autobiography
Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer
The first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, ?father of the atomic bomb,? the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war.

Fiction
Geraldine Brooks. March
From Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, and has added adult resonance to portray the moral complexity of war and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism.

General Nonfiction
Caroline Elkins. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
Thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II, but just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu--some one and a half million people. The story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold, because of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence.

History

David M. Oshinsky. Polio: An American Story
All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines-and beyond.

Poetry
Claudia Emerson. Late Wife

Drama
No Award Given