Knopf author Richard Russo was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls last week, and Simon & Schuster authors claimed two Pulitzers. Diane McWhorter won the general nonfiction prize for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution; and David McCullough was awarded the biography prize for his bestselling biography John Adams. This was McCullough's second Pulitzer, having won earlier for Truman.
With Russo's win, Vintage moved up the publication of his paperback edition to last week.
Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (FSG) won the history prize, and the poetry prize was awarded to Carl Dennis's Practical Gods from Penguin Books.
McWhorter's book has also been awarded the J. Anthony Lukas book prize for nonfiction. The $10,000 prize is one of three awards given out as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, a nonfiction awards program administered by Columbia University's Journalism School.
In addition to McWhorter's award, the Lukas project presented Mark Roseman with the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize for A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi German (Holt/Metropolitan). And the $45,000 Lukas work-in-progress award was presented to Jacques Leslie for On Dams, an investigation into dams around the world that will be published by FSG.
