Special Collections
Pulitzer Prize Award Winners
Description: Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles, winners of the Pulitzer Prize Award. Note: Some drama winners are available and are listed under Fiction awards. #award
- Table View
- List View
The Known World
by Edward JonesThe Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.
Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Finalist for the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction.
King: A Life
by Jonathan EigHailed by the New York Times as "the new definitive biography," King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times.
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.
In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.
New York Times Bestseller
The Killer Angels
by Michael ShaaraIn the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams.
One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love.
And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war.
Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable--the dramatic story of the battleground for America's destiny.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 9-10 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
Khrushchev
by William TaubmanThe definitive biography of the mercurial Soviet leader who succeeded and denounced Stalin. Nikita Khrushchev was one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin's death, Khrushchev left a contradictory stamp on his country and on the world. His life and career mirror the Soviet experience: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, Khrushchev nevertheless retained his humanity: his daring attempt to reform communism prepared the ground for its eventual collapse; and his awkward efforts to ease the cold war triggered its most dangerous crises.
This is the first comprehensive biography of Khrushchev and the first of any Soviet leader to reflect the full range of sources that have become available since the USSR collapsed. Combining a page-turning historical narrative with penetrating political and psychological analysis, this book brims with the life and excitement of a man whose story personified his era.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Keepers of the House
by Shirley Ann GrauA novel that follows 7 generations of the Howland family and the community they build around themselves in rural Alabama.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Journey in the Dark
by Martin FlavinSam Braden worked to get everything he had ever wanted--wealth, love, and respect. But in the end, his loneliness revealed the folly of those dreams.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
John C. Calhoun
by Margaret L. CoitPulitzer Prize winning biography of the prominent politician during the early 1800s.
John Adams
by David McculloughIn this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as “out of his senses”; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history.
This is history on a grand scale—a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Jackson Pollock
by Gregory W. Smith and Steven W. NaifehBased on family letters and documents, lengthy interviews with his widow, Lee Krasner, as well as his psychologists and psychoanalysts, this book explodes the myths surrounding his death in 1956.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
by Susan SheehanSylvia Frumkin a highly intelligent young girl became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. Susan Sheehan followed Sylvia for almost a year, talking with and observing her.
Ironweed
by William KennedyIronweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally - and fatally - dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present. . .
Invisible Child
by Andrea ElliottInvisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. Dasani was named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city.
In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, the homeless crisis in New York City has exploded amid the deepening chasm between rich and poor.
Dasani must guide her siblings through a city riddled by hunger, violence, drug addiction, homelessness, and the monitoring of child protection services. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter to protect the ones she loves. When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself?
By turns heartbreaking and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.
El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer
by Cristina Rivera GarzaEste libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sí, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar. «El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue víctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenía años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistía en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierto había descubierto que en ella, como bien lo había dicho Albert Camus, había un invencible verano. Lo dejaría atrás. Empezaría una nueva vida. Haría una maestría y después un doctorado; viajaría a Londres. «La decisión de él fue que ella no tendría una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidí abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia. «El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y luchar contra la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales.»
In This Our Life
by Ellen GlasgowA woman steals her sister's husband and succeeds in ruining several lives, revealing the differences between generations of her troubled family.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa LahiriNavigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.
Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.
The Internal Enemy
by Alan TaylorThis searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reveals the pivot in the nation's path between the founding and civil war.
Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom's swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation's course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History
In Our Image
by Stanley KarnowTraces the history of the Philippines, discusses the influence of Spain and the United States, and looks at the problems facing the Philippines today.
Independence Day
by Richard FordFrank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He's still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank's Independence Day, however, turns out not as he'd planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. Independence Day captures the mystery of life -- in all its conflicted glory -- with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power.
Imperial Reckoning
by Caroline ElkinsAs part of the Allied forces, 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 Kikuyusome one and a half million people. The system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths was the result of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising. Caroline Elkins spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of survivors of the camps and the British and African loyalists who detained them. The result is an account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya - a pivotal moment in twentieth-century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
by Bernard BailynIn this book, Bailyn discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul BellowHumboldt's Gift is the story about Charlie Citrine who posthumously receives a gift from the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer that changes the way he views himself and the world. Long Synopsis: In Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, the main protagonist, Charlie Citrine, a successful writer, is an intellectual who is tormented by feelings of emptiness and by disturbing recollections. In his youth, his love of literature causes him to befriend the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer. While he is alive, Fleischer becomes Citrine's mentor and teaches him the importance of the spiritual and sparks his interest in intellectual pursuits. Through Fleischer's death along with other experiences and associations, Citrine learns how to integrate his spirituality and intellectuality with the mundane. Throughout the novel, Citrine grapples with the question of how the human being with an infinite soul is going to live in the often anti-human and materialistic society and culture. Charlie is reawakened to his responsibilities. Equally important as asking this question, Citrine finds the courage to continue in his life which is plagued by paradoxes and uncertainties. In the end of the novel, he is awakened to his responsibilities and learns to become involved in everyday reality.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
House Made of Dawn
by N. Scott MomadayThe magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a stranger in his native land A young Native American, Abel has come home from a foreign war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world -- modern, industrial America -- pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, claiming his soul, goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust. And the young man, torn in two, descends into hell.
The Hours
by Michael CunninghamPassionate, profound, and deeply moving, 'The Hours' is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, who on one New York morning goes about planning a party in honor of a beloved friend; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf, recuperating in a London suburb, and beginning to write 'Mrs. Dalloway.' By the end of the novel, the stories have intertwined, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace, demonstrating Michael Cunningham's deep empathy for his characters as well as the extraordinary resonance of his prose.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Honey in the Horn
by H. L. DavisIn this epic work by award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist H.L. Davis, the virtues of the frontier live again in the lives and characters of Oregon settlers during the homesteading period from 1906-1908.
Winner of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
History of the Civil War, 1861-1865
by James Ford RhodesAwarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1917, this volume is widely regarded as the first unbiased history of the Civil War and one of the best single-volume studies. It is remarkable for its scholarly research, objectivity, and engrossing narrative style. "Well worthy of the welcome." -- American Historical Review. Index. Notes. 2 maps. New introduction.