Pulitzer Prize Winners
The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States  administered by Columbia University.
 
2021 
FICTION
 
 
The Night Watchman 
by Louise Erdrich

A historical novel based on the life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. 
NONFICTION
 
 
Wilmington's Lie : The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist documents the events of the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection and its unrecognized role in reversing the city’s mixed-race advances, overthrowing local government and promoting white-supremacist agendas.
2020
 FICTION
 
The Nickel Boys 
by Colson Whitehead

A follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning, The Underground Railroad, follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
NONFICTION
 
The End of the Myth : From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
by Greg Grandin

The author of the Pulitzer finalist, Fordlandia, examines how the identity-shaping idea of an open and ever-expanding American frontier has evolved from early westward expansion into the reactionary populism of Donald Trump's border wall proposals.
The Undying : Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
by Anne Boyer

The author presents a meditation on pain and economics that draws on her experiences as a single parent with a catastrophic illness to explore emerging ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of healthcare.
2019 
FICTION
 
The Overstory
by Richard Powers

The National Book Award-winning author of The Overstory presents an impassioned novel of activism and natural-world power that is comprised of interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
NON-FICTION
 
Amity and Prosperity : One family and the Fracturing of America
by Eliza Griswold

The award-winning author of The Tenth Parallel explores the costs of fracking as demonstrated by the volatile personalities and politics of a rural Allegheny town where an unlikely whistle-blower tried to investigate the sources of mysterious local illnesses
2018 
FICTION
 
Less
by Andrew Sean Greer

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.
NON-FICTION
 
Locking Up Our Own : Crime and Punishment in Black America
by James Forman

A consequential argument about race, crime and law in today's America by a Yale legal scholar and former public defender examines the urgent debates surrounding the criminal justice system and its activities involving mass incarceration, aggressive police tactics and their impact on at-risk people of color and beleaguered law-enforcement officers.
2017 
FICTION
 
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead

The award-winning author of The Noble Hustle chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
NON-FICTION
 
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond

A Harvard sociologist examines the under-represented challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by dysfunctional legal systems.
2016 
FICTION
 
The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.
NON-FICTION
 
Black Flags : the Rise of ISIS
by Joby Warrick

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Triple Agent traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents.
2015
FICTION
 
All the Light We Cannot See : A Novel
by Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
 
NON-FICTION
 
The Sixth Extinction : An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert

Drawing on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists and other researchers, an award-winning writer for The New Yorker discusses the five devastating mass extinctions on earth and predicts the coming of a sixth.
 
2014
FICTION

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt

Taken in by a wealthy family friend after surviving an accident that killed his mother, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker tries to adjust to life on Park Avenue in this new novel by the author of The Secret History.
NON-FICTION

Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
by Dan Fagin

A Newsday investigative reporter presents a narrative account of the 1971 industrial waste dumping incident in Toms River, New Jersey, that led to a cluster of childhood cancers and culminated in decades of legal fights, a record settlement and an unprecedented government study linking pollution to illness.
2013
FICTION

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel
by Adam Johnson

The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il.
NON-FICTION

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
by Gilbert King

Chronicles a little-known court case in which Thurgood Marshall successfully saved a black citrus worker from the electric chair after the worker was accused of raping a white woman with three other black men.
2012
NO FICTION AWARD GIVEN 
NON-FICTION

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
by Stephen Greenblatt

A humanities professor describes the impact had by the translation of the last remaining manuscript of On the Nature of Things by Roman philosopher Lucretius, which fueled the Renaissance and inspired artists, great thinkers and scientists.
2011
FICTION

A Visit From the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970's San Francisco to the post-war future.
NON-FICTION
 
The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
 
A historical assessment of cancer addresses both the courageous battles against the complex disease and the misperceptions and hubris that have compromised modern understandings, providing coverage of such topics as ancient-world surgeries and the developments of present-day treatments.
2010 
FICTION

Tinkers
by Paul Harding

On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby's thoughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.
 
NON-FICTION

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy
by David E. Hoffman

A history of the end of the arms race describes the Soviet Union's development of an automatic retaliatory attack system, the United States's efforts to create space-based missile defenses, and the struggle to prevent nuclear weapons from being acquired by terrorists.
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