Pullet Surprise Winners

From today's New York Times:

The 89th annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. Following are the winners in Letters, Drama and Music.


FICTION: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Nearly a quarter of a century passed between Ms. Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1981, and this second book, the elegiac tale of a 76-year-old Congregationalist pastor who, facing imminent death, writes a letter to his 7-year-old son. Gilead is set in 1956 in Iowa, a place that Ms. Robinson, 61, knows well as a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.


GENERAL NONFICTION: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll

In chronicling how Al Qaeda's brand of Islamic fundamentalism came to thrive in the chaos left by the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, Mr. Coll, 46, an associate editor and former managing editor at The Washington Post, pieced together the period of ignorance and inaction that led to the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

BIOGRAPHY: De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

Mr. Stevens, 53, is the art critic for New York magazine and a former art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek. He is married to Ms. Swan, 54, who has been a writer at Time and a music critic and senior arts editor at Newsweek. Ten years in the making, this book about de Kooning is widely considered the first major biography of the painter.

HISTORY: Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer

Mr. Fischer, 69, is Warren professor of history at Brandeis University. In Washington's Crossing, he shows how a despairing American army refused to surrender during the darker moments of the Revolution. Reached at his home in Wayland, Mass., Mr. Fischer said he believed that his book presented a complex look at the general. "My Washington was a figure who took me very much by surprise," he said. "What he did was bring together the values of the American Revolution with the conducting of the war."


POETRY: Delights & Shadows, by Ted Kooser

Mr. Kooser, of Garland, Neb., is the poet laureate of the United States. Like Wallace Stevens, Mr. Kooser, 65, worked in life insurance for much of his career. He was vice president of Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance, where he wrote advertising copy and oversaw legal affairs; he rose daily at 4:30 a.m. to compose poetry, which he asked his secretary and colleagues to critique. He retired in 1998.

Clarity is the hallmark of Mr. Kooser's style, with deceptively modest metaphors grounded in the Nebraska landscape. The Bloomsbury Review described his work as "like clean, clear water."

DRAMA: Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley

At first glance, the genesis of Doubt would seem to be obvious: The play tells the story of a strong-minded nun investigating suspicions of pedophilia in a Roman Catholic school, and was produced after real-life sex scandals in the church. But Mr. Shanley, 54, said the play was actually inspired by what he called a visceral reaction to current American political discourse. "People who have great certainty can be a force of good, but can also be incredibly destructive," he said yesterday.

MUSIC: Second Concerto for Orchestra, by Steven Stucky

Mr. Stucky's concerto is a colorfully orchestrated work written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which Mr. Stucky has been associated with - first as composer in residence, and now as consulting composer for new music - since 1988. The piece includes allusions to works by Ravel, Stravinsky and Sibelius, composers Mr. Stucky finds particularly influential. But it is also built on motifs that Mr. Stucky based on a code he devised, in which the letters of the alphabet were assigned to musical pitches.