The Pulitzer Prizes are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
Whittaker Chambers was an American writer and intelligence agent. After early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), he defected from the Soviet underground in 1938. He then worked for Time magazine (1939–1948) before his testimony about the Ware Group and the participation of Alger Hiss saw Chambers sued for libel in 1948 in a case referred to as "the trial of the century", all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959). US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Boris Yakovlevich Bukov, also Boris Bykov ("Sasha") Regiment Commissar was a member of the Communist Party since 1919. Bykov was head of the underground apparatus with which Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss were connected.
Yuval Levin is an Israeli-born American conservative political analyst, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs (2009–present), the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (2019–present), and a contributing editor of National Review (2007–present) and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis (2003–present).
Anthony Shadid was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Baghdad and Beirut who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting twice, in 2004 and 2010.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Herbert Solow was an American journalist and co-editor of the Menorah Journal who was first a Communist fellow-traveler in the 1920s, a Trotskyist in the 1930s, and then abandoned leftist politics to work in Henry Luce's publishing empire as Fortune editor.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American essayist. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Thomas Byrne Edsall is an American journalist and academic. He is best known for his weekly opinion column for The New York Times, Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and for The Baltimore Sun, and as a correspondent for The New Republic. In addition, he spent 25 years covering national politics for the Washington Post. He held the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism until 2014.
Helene Cooper is a Liberian-born American journalist who is a Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. Before that, she was the paper's White House correspondent in Washington, D.C. She joined the Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor.
Jo Becker is an American journalist and author and a four-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. She works as an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
Wilder Hobson was an American writer and editor for Time (1930s-1940s), Fortune (1940s), Harper's Bazaar (1950s), and Newsweek (1960s) magazines. He was also a competent musician (trombone), author of an history of American jazz, and long-time contributor to Saturday Review magazine. Also, he served on the planning committee of the Institute of Jazz Studies.
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted "The Argument", a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
Jacob Burck was a Polish-born Jewish-American painter, sculptor, and award-winning editorial cartoonist. Active in the Communist movement from 1926 as a political cartoonist and muralist, Burck quit the Communist Party after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, deeply offended by political demands there to manipulate his work.
Benjamin W. Huebsch was an American publisher in New York City in the early 20th century.
Diana Blackmon Henriques is an American financial journalist and author working in New York City. Since 1989, she has been a reporter on the staff of The New York Times working on staff until December 2011 and under contract as a contributing writer thereafter.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
Witness, first published in May 1952, is a best-selling book of memoirs by American writer Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), which recounts his life as a dedicated Marxist-communist ideologist in the 1920s, his work in the Soviet underground during the 1930s, and his 1948 testimony before the US Congress, which led to a criminal indictment against Alger Hiss and two trials in 1949.
