Pulitzer Prizes announced for 2011
Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, a sprawling story that pivots from the story of an indie record label owner to a wide network of loosely connected characters, has won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer board called the book “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.” Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, about a Manhattan family, and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered, about a North Korean refugee and an American GI, were the finalists. (Notably, Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed Freedom was not recognized; Franzen’s The Corrections was a Pulitzer finalist in 2002.)
Clybourne Park, a play by Bruce Norris about racially divergent families moving into (and out of) a single suburban home in 1959 and 2009, won the prize for Drama, cited as a “powerful work whose memorable characters speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.” Lisa D’Amour’s tragicomedy Detroit and John Guare’s historical comedy A Free Man of Color, were the finalists.
Here’s the full list of winners and finalists for the “Letters, Drama, and Music” categories:
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
FINALISTS:
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
FINALISTS:
Detroit by Lisa D’Amour
A Free Man of Color by John Guare
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner
FINALISTS:
Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry
Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
FINALISTS:
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley
Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon by Michael O’Brien
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan
FINALISTS:
The Common Man by Maurice Manning
Break the Glass by Jean Valentine
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
FINALISTS:
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
Madame White Snake by Zhou Long
FINALISTS:
Arches by Fred Lerdahl
Comala by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon
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