Our Pulitzer Prize Winners

2025 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed. In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant.

2025 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

In the 18th century, two men — exact contemporaries and polar opposites — dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: Identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts weaves a sweeping, unforgettable narrative spell, exploring the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.

2024 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War — and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds. Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.

2024 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Biography

“A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem). Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence — handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones — to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is — and what she fights for — today.

2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

“A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ‘20s and Great Depression” (Vanity Fair). At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

G-Man is the groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape. Hoover transformed a scandal-riddled law-enforcement backwater, into a modern machine — one just as oppressive as it was promising. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a strongarm for white supremacists and the politicized Christian right, serving eight presidents. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history — not at the fringes, but at the center — and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography

When Hua Hsu met Ken in college, the two built a friendship on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends — his memories — Hua turned to writing. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

2023 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy — from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing — telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.

2022 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. As Dasani comes of age, she must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. 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? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality — told through the crucible of one remarkable girl.

2020 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Based on the real story of a school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation’s best” (Entertainment Weekly).

2017 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: Engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage — and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

2017 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

The definitive history of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice. Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.

2017 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth. Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?

2017 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

2016 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. Stiles argues that, although Custer was justly noted for his exploits on the western frontier, he also played a central role as both a wide-ranging participant and polarizing public figure in his extraordinary, transformational time — a time of civil war, emancipation, brutality toward Native Americans, and, finally, the Industrial Revolution — even as he became one of its casualties. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation. It casts surprising new light on one of the best-known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

2016 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Autobiography

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: A beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

2016 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

In a thrilling dramatic narrative, the award-winning reporter 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. Black Flags is a brilliant and definitive history that reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.

2015 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, includes reports from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism in Europe.

2014 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

The riveting true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, Toms River melds hard-hitting investigative reporting, a fascinating scientific detective story, and an unforgettable cast of characters into a sweeping narrative. A gripping human drama rooted in a centuries-old scientific quest, Toms River is a tale of dumpers at midnight and deceptions in broad daylight, of corporate avarice and government neglect, and of a few brave individuals who refused to keep silent until the truth was exposed.

2013 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

The bestselling novel of North Korea: An epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: A North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.

2013 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

Written with the style of a great novelist and the intrigue of a Cold War thriller, Embers of War is a landmark work that will forever change your understanding of how and why America went to war in Vietnam. An epic story of wasted opportunities and deadly miscalculations, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another. Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Embers of War is a gripping, heralded work that illuminates the hidden history of the French and American experiences in Vietnam.

2013 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

A “richly imagined biography” (The New York Times Book Review) of General Alex Dumas, who rose from slavery to command vast armies in the French Revolutionary Wars — and whose exploits were immortalized in his son’s novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

2013 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

From one of today’s best poets — a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

2012 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

Hailed as “a masterpiece” (San Francisco Chronicle), Manning Marable’s acclaimed biography of Malcolm X finally does justice to one of the most influential and controversial figures of twentieth-century American history. Filled with startling new information and shocking revelations, Malcom X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America. It is a stunning achievement, the definitive work on one of our greatest advocates for social change.

2012 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

This extraordinary biography delves into the mind of the brilliant diplomat who shaped U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union for decades. Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.

2011 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn’t, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune).

2011 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

From the author of Alexander Hamilton, the New York Times bestselling biography that inspired the musical, comes a gripping portrait of the first president of the United States. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Ron Chernow shatters forever the stereotype of George Washington as a stolid, unemotional figure and brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods.

2010 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of that economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for WWII and reverberated for decades. As we continue to grapple with economic turmoil, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

2010 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. We see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.

2010 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

The first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today.

2009 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life — sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition — its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

2009 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

The definitive biography of Andrew Jackson, a larger-than-life president who defied norms, divided a nation, and changed Washington forever.

2009 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age of Neoslavery.”

2008 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who — from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister — dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú — a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere — and risk it all — in the name of love.

2007 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive that “only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle). Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: Ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total destruction.

2007 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials, and photographs in the American press — and the journalists responsible for them — profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.

2007 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

“A wonderful portrait of a charismatic preacher with a deeply flawed private life, this biography vividly conveys the color and contradictions of nineteenth-century America. With a sure grasp of history, penetrating insights into religion, and many marvelous turns of phrase, Applegate brings to life a time that uncannily prefigures our own” (William Taubman, author of Khrushchev).

2007 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

A “heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11” (The New York Times Book Review), this definitive history explains in gripping detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

2006 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story “filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man” (Sue Monk Kidd). A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as a renowned author of historical fiction.

2006 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography

The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.