Special Collections
Pulitzer Prize Award Winners
Description: Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles, winners of the Pulitzer Prize Award. Note: Some drama winners are available and are listed under Fiction awards. #award
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Present at the Creation
by Dean AchesonIn these memoirs by the former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson sees himself as having been "present at the creation" of the American century. Acheson's policies were praised by many and damned by others, including Joseph McCarthy.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry Adams'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams, ' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors. ' His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors--great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams--Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author's death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age. With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris.
The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry AdamsA scion of the famous Adams family of American statesmen, historian Henry Adams crafted this well-known autobiographical work, which reflects his constant search for order in a world of chaos. He cast himself as a modern everyman, seeking coherence in a fragmented universe and concluding that his education was inadequate for the demands of modern society.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The People's Choice, from Washington to Harding
by Herbert AgarA candid inquiry into the policies & personalities of America's presidents, sweeping away popular misconceptions. A U. S. history as seen from the White House.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
A Death in the Family
by James Agee and Steve EarlePublished in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written.
As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident-a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family.
A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Lords of Finance
by Liaquat AhamedWinner of the 2010 Pulitzer PrizeWith penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth centuryIt 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 taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear?that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation? and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard.For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world?s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression.As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.
Disgraced
by Ayad Akhtar"Sparkling and combustible" (Bloomberg Businessweek), "DISGRACED rubs all kinds of unexpected raw spots with intelligence and humor" (Newsday). "In dialogue that bristles with wit and intelligence, Akhtar puts contemporary attitudes toward religion under a microscope, revealing how tenuous self-image can be for people born into one way of being who have embraced another.... Everyone has been told that politics and religion are two subjects that should be off-limits at social gatherings. But watching these characters rip into these forbidden topics, there's no arguing that they make for ear-tickling good theater" (New York Times). "Add a liberal flow of alcohol and a couple of major secrets suddenly revealed, and you've got yourself one dangerous dinner party" (Associated Press).
A Delicate Balance
by Edward AlbeeOne of Edward Albee's most celebrated works, A Delicate Balance premiered on Broadway in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1967, the first of three he has received for his work. The play revolves around wealthy middle-aged couple Agnes and Tobias, who have their complacency shattered when their longtime friends Harry and Edna appear at their doorstep. Claiming an encroaching, nameless "fear" has forced them from their own home, these neighbors bring a firestorm of doubt, recrimination and ultimately solace, upsetting the "delicate balance" of Agnes and Tobias's household. In recent years, A Delicate Balance has enjoyed many and new stunning revivals, running now, including a Broadway production in 1996, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival, and another at the Alameida Theatre in London in 2011.
Seascape
by Edward AlbeeDealing with an almost surreal Howard Hughes-like figure, a bearded recluse who is the richest man in the world, this often comic and brilliantly revealing allegory continues the playwright's preoccupation with the mythic aspects of American life.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Gulag
by Anne ApplebaumThe Gulag--the vast array of Soviet concentration camps--was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust. The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country's barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned. But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West. Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Most Famous Man in America
by Debby ApplegateNo one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings—especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who penned the century’s bestselling book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father Lyman's Old Testament–style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament–based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him New York’s number one tourist attraction, so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed “Beecher Boats.”
Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era—among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and shipping rifles—nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles”—to the antislavery resistance fighters in Kansas. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him.
And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes—from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism—suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day.
Featuring the page-turning suspense of a novel and dramatic new historical evidence, Debby Applegate has written the definitive biography of this captivating, mercurial, and sometimes infuriating figure. In our own time, when religion and politics are again colliding and adultery in high places still commands headlines, Beecher’s story sheds new light on the culture and conflicts of contemporary America.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Versed
by Rae ArmantroutRae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: "Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience." Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John AshberyA collection of poetry by John Ashbery.
Winner of the National Book Award.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
An Army at Dawn
by Rick AtkinsonThe liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great power.
Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary but fallible commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel.
Brilliantly researched, rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's narrative provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
by Bernard BailynIn this book, Bailyn discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Voyagers to the West
by Bernard BailynThe winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in History is reinterpreted by the foremost colonial historian of American history, using the perspective of migration as an organizing principle. 32 photos, 19 maps.
Growing Up
by Russell BakerThe Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir about coming of age in America between the world wars: &“So warm, so likable and so disarmingly funny&” (The New York Times). One of the New York Times&’ &“50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years&” Ranging from the backwoods of Virginia to a New Jersey commuter town to the city of Baltimore, this remarkable memoir recounts Russell Baker&’s experience of growing up in pre–World War II America, before he went on to a celebrated career in journalism. With poignant, humorous tales of powerful love, awkward sex, and courage in the face of adversity, Baker reveals how he helped his mother and family through the Great Depression by delivering papers and hustling subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post—a job which introduced him to bullies, mentors, and heroes who endured this national disaster with hard work and good cheer. Called &“a treasure&” by Anne Tyler and &“a blessing&” by Time magazine, this autobiography is a modern-day classic—&“a wondrous book [with scenes] as funny and touching as Mark Twain&’s&” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). &“In lovely, haunting prose, he has told a story that is deeply in the American grain.&” —The Washington Post Book World &“A terrific book.&” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Ozone Journal
by Peter BalakianThe title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Years of Grace
by Margaret Ayer BarnesYears of Grace is the story of forty years and the changes wrought in two generations. Set in Chicago, the novel focuses on Jane Ward, daughter of a socially prominent family, who grows up in the repressed, pseudo-genteel society of the 1880s and 1890s. In her youth, indeed, throughout her life, Jane is a model of decorum. She refuses to marry a young artist whom she loves, because her parents disapprove. She accepts a family-approved husband because it is expected of her. She avoids an affair later in life because it might disgrace husband and family. Twenty years later, Jane's daughter Cicily encounters the identical decisions, but being a product of the war years, when marriage is fast and divorce easy, Cicily cares little for reputation, and lives her life accordingly. Through it all. Mrs. Barnes maintains a scrupulous neutrality, presenting each life as a reflection of the times, never presuming to judge or moralize. If a change in attitude is apparent between generations, it represents only a portion of the total evolvement of society during the forty year period; and Mrs. Barnes reflects in minute detail, changes in fashion, architecture, and interior decor as well as history and social conditions.
The author's first novel, Years of Grace won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1931.
Samuel Johnson
by Walter Jackson BateW. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson has been hailed as a supreme example of the biographer's art and the first great modern life of Johnson. Bate's work is literary biography at its finest, delving into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Award
The Denial of Death
by Ernest BeckerWinner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul BellowHumboldt's Gift is the story about Charlie Citrine who posthumously receives a gift from the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer that changes the way he views himself and the world. Long Synopsis: In Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, the main protagonist, Charlie Citrine, a successful writer, is an intellectual who is tormented by feelings of emptiness and by disturbing recollections. In his youth, his love of literature causes him to befriend the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer. While he is alive, Fleischer becomes Citrine's mentor and teaches him the importance of the spiritual and sparks his interest in intellectual pursuits. Through Fleischer's death along with other experiences and associations, Citrine learns how to integrate his spirituality and intellectuality with the mundane. Throughout the novel, Citrine grapples with the question of how the human being with an infinite soul is going to live in the often anti-human and materialistic society and culture. Charlie is reawakened to his responsibilities. Equally important as asking this question, Citrine finds the courage to continue in his life which is plagued by paradoxes and uncertainties. In the end of the novel, he is awakened to his responsibilities and learns to become involved in everyday reality.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Western Star
by Stephen Vincent Benét"INVOCATION
Not for the great, not for the marvelous, Not for the barren husbands of the gold; Not for the arrowmakers of the soul, Wasted with truth, the star-regarding wise; Not even for the few Who would not be the hunter nor the prey, Who stood between the eater and the meat, The wilderness saints, the guiltless, the absolved, Born out of Time, the seekers of the balm Where the green grass grows from the broken heart; But for all these, the nameless, numberless Seed of the field, the mortal wood and earth Hewn for the clearing, trampled for the floor, Uprooted and cast out upon the stone From Jamestown to Benicia. This is their song, this is their testament, Carved to their likeness, speaking in their tongue And branded with the iron of their star. I say you shall remember them. I say When night has fallen on your loneliness And the deep wood beyond the ruined wall Seems to step forward swiftly with the dusk, You shall remember them. You shall not see Water or wheat or axe-mark on the tree and not remember them."
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner and Jackson J. BensonStegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of personal, historical, and geographic discovery Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family. "Cause for celebration . . . A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly"Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enchantment of life." —Los Angeles Times This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jackson J. Benson.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
