eBranch Blog

May 01, 2007

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced in April. The following are the Pulitzer Prize winners for Letters & Drama.

Fiction
Cormac McCarthy. The Road
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastate.

Nonfiction
Lawrence Wright. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Explores both the American and Arab sides of the September 11th terrorist attacks in an account of the people, ideas, events, and intelligence failures that led to the attacks.

Biography/Autobiography
Debby Applegate. The Most Famous Man in America
No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings - especially his sister. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who penned the century's bestselling book Uncle Tom's Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father Lyman's Old Testament-style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament-based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity.

History
Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat
This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South - and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation's press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Special Citations & Awards
Ray Bradbury

Drama
David Lindsay-Abaire. Rabbit Hole

Poetry
Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard