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
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Anna Christie
by Eugene O'NeillEarly in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives its tension from the former's disaffection for the seafaring life and the latter's love for a sailor. The father-daughter conflict elicits a shocking confession, which illuminates the author's contention that character is fate and the seemingly external forces controlling destiny actually lie within
.Anna Christie amply displays O'Neill's extraordinary insights into character and his masterly use of language, qualities that have earned him acclaim as one of America's greatest playwrights. Students and lovers of modern theater will prize this inexpensive edition of his landmark drama.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Three Plays
by Eugene O'NeillWinner of the Nobel Prize
These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' hearts.
Eugene O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City. His father was James O'Neill, the famous dramatic actor; and during his early years O'Neill traveled much with his parents. In 1909 he went on a gold-prospecting expedition to South America; he later shipped as a seaman to Buenos Aires, worked at various occupations in the Argentine, and tended mules on a cattle steamer to South Africa. He returned to New York destitute, then worked briefly as a reporter on a newspaper in New London, Connecticut, at which point an attack of tuberculosis sent him for six months to a sanitarium. This event marked the turning point in his career, and shortly after, at the age of twenty-four, he began his first play. His major works include The Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1921; Desire Under the Elms, 1924; The Great God Brown, 1925; Strange Interlude, 1926, 1927; Mourning Becomes Electra, 1929, 1931; Ah, Wilderness, 1933; Days Without End, 1934; A Moon for the Misbegotten, 1945; The Iceman Cometh, 1946; and several plays produced posthumously, including Long Day's Journey into Night, A Touch of the Poet, and Hughie. Eugene O'Neill died in 1953.
Strange Interlude was a Pulitzer Prize winner
Polio
by David M. OshinskyAll 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. Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The National Foundation revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America, using "poster children" and the famous March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a few well-heeled benefactors), creating the largest researchand rehabilitation network in the history of medicine. The polio experience also revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America - increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed - the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life. Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Digest
by Gregory PardloFrom Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.
Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Topdog/Underdog
by Suzan-Lori ParksA darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.Suzan-Lori Parks is the author of numerous plays, including In the Blood and Venus. She is currently head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
Main Currents in American Thought
by Vernon Louis ParringtonAnalysis of how our scholarship developed.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Dead Are Arising
by Les Payne and Tamara PayneAn epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to create an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic, National Book Award–winning biography, which interweaves previously unknown details of Malcolm X’s life—from harrowing Depression-era vignettes to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination—into an extraordinary account that contextualizes Malcolm X’s life against the wider currents of American history. Bookended by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, who heroically completed the biography after her father’s death in 2018, The Dead Are Arising affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole and Walker PercyA Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store.
The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences–Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly’s matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens–their spirits are all here.
Filled with unforgettable characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence, and dazzling in its originality, Toole’s comic classic just keeps getting better year after year.
Then the War
by Carl PhillipsA new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the War
I’m a song, changing. I’m a light
rain falling through a vast
darkness toward a different
darkness.
Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest;” Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started.
Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.
Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.
Night Watch
by Jayne Anne PhillipsIn 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.
Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.
His Family
by Ernest Poole1918 Pulitzer Prize Winner. At sixty, Roger Gale looks at how his family -- his three daughters in particular -- respond to the changing times. He sees a little bit of himself in each of them.
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
by Katherine Anne PorterPorter’s reputation as one of Americanca’s most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form.
Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
A Problem From Hell
by Samantha PowerIn 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead.
President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing. " American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents.
In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U. S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway.
Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D. C. ), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why.
While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century. -Samantha
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Overstory
by Richard PowersWinner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Theodore Roosevelt
by Henry F. PringleThis is a carefully revised and--perhaps happily--shortened version of a biography first published almost a quarter of a century ago. The author said then, and reiterates now, that Theodore Roosevelt was polygonal. He was a man of many ideas, and few of them lacked brilliance. The book still attempts to tell the whole story of an extraordinarily full life.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Shipping News
by Annie ProulxWinner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph--in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.
Fortunate Son
by Lewis B. PullerLewis B. Puller, Jr., the son of the most decorated Marine in the Corps' history, volunteered for duty in Vietnam after college. He came home a few months later missing both legs, his left hand, and two fingers of his right hand. He would never walk again, though he would complete law school, serve on President Ford's clemency board, and run for Congress. He would also live with the nightmares of Vietnam, and his growing dependence on alcohol. Few have told their story with more honesty, or more devastating openness.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Original Meanings
by Jack N. RakoveFrom abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan RawlingsNo novel better epitomizes the love between a child and a pet than The Yearling. Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend. There has been a film and even a musical based on this moving story, a fine work of great American literature.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Black Count
by Tom ReissHere is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo - a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution, in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East - until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world's first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. From the Hardcover edition.
Lenin's Tomb
by David RemnickIn the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all." --Wall Street Journal.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
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.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard RhodesTwenty-five years after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.
This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.
From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.
Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Winner of the National Book Award
Fences
by August Wilson and Lloyd RichardsThe 1987 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part "Pittsburgh Cycle" plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s. . . a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can. . . a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. . .
The Town
by Conrad RichterIn this superb novel--the longest Mr. Richter has written--Sayward, the eldest daughter of Worth and Jary Luckett, completes her mission and lives to see the transition of her family and her friends, American pioneers, from the ways of the wilderness to the ways of civilization. Here is the tumultuous story of the Lucketts, an American family born in the wilderness, grown to face the changing ways of America during the turmoil that was the first half of the nineteenth century. The Trees began the story of Worth and Jary, a wild and woodsfaring family who lived a roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. How young Sayward and her family, facing the realization that the forests had become fields and settlements, took up the arduous task of tilling the Ohio soil was the story continued in The Fields. But The Town is a much bigger book in every way than its predecessors; it is in fact a major literary event and with them comprises a great American epic.