Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on Monday for The Nickel Boys (Doubleday), the devastating story of two boys at a reform school in the Jim Crow South and the nightmarish abuse they and other African American students endured there.
The book, which won the Kirkus Prize last October, is based on the case of an actual Florida school. Kirkus’ reviewer called its narrative “more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.” Whitehead won the Pulitzer in 2017 for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad.
The General Nonfiction prize was split between two titles. The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Times, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by poet Anne Boyer, is a memoir of the author’s experience with breast cancer and a meditation on disease and mortality. Kirkus’ reviewer called it a “haunting testimony about death that is filled with life.” Boyer shared the prize with Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt). According to Kirkus’ review, it is an “engaging and disquieting analysis of America’s recurring choice between ‘a humane ethic of social citizenship’ and barbarism.”
W. Caleb McDaniel received the Pulitzer Prize in History for Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (Oxford University Press). The book tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a twice-enslaved woman who successfully sued the deputy sheriff who captured her and sold her back into slavery. The Pulitzer jurists called it “a masterfully researched meditation on reparations.”
The prize in biography went to Benjamin Moser for Sontag (Ecco), a biography of iconic intellectual Susan Sontag that Kirkus called a “nuanced, authoritative portrait of a legendary artist.”
Jericho Brown was awarded the poetry prize for The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), praised by the jury as “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”
The Pulitzer Prizes, typically announced at Columbia University’s Journalism School, were revealed via YouTube by administrator Dana Canedy, who spoke from her living room because of shelter-in-place restrictions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The winners were determined, Canedy said “following days of rigorous virtual and digital debate, discussion, and contemplation among our Board.”
Originally scheduled for April 20, the prize announcement had already been postponed by two weeks because so many journalists were busy covering the pandemic.
Canedy noted that “the arts have the power to sustain, unite and inspire us during times of uncertainty and fear” and that “many are finding needed distraction in the pages of a book.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
