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.
Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies.
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume (1986) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
Taylor Branch is an American author and historian who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and much of the history of the American civil rights movement. The final volume of the 2,912-page trilogy, collectively called America in the King Years, was released in January 2006, and an abridgment, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, was published in 2013.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson by the American writer Robert Caro. Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. A fifth volume is expected to deal with the bulk of Johnson's presidency and post-presidential years. The series is published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer who is serving as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral since November 7, 2021. A former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek. He is the author of several books. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist. He currently is a writer for Prospect.
Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington: A Life is a biography of George Washington, the first president of the United States, written by American historian and biographer Ron Chernow and published in 2010. The book is a "one-volume, cradle-to-grave narrative" that attempts to provide a fresh portrait of Washington as "real, credible, and charismatic in the same way he was perceived by his contemporaries".
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt is a 2009 biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a 19th-century American industrialist and philanthropist who built his fortune in the shipping and railroad industries, becoming one of the wealthiest Americans in the history of the U.S. It was written by American biographer T. J. Stiles. The book was honored with the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Annalyn Swan is an American writer and biographer who has written extensively about the arts. With her husband, art critic Mark Stevens, she is the author of de Kooning: An American Master (2004), a biography of Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, which was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. De Kooning also won the National Book Critics Circle prize for biography and the Los Angeles Times biography award, and was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by The New York Times. In her review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: "The elusiveness of its subject makes the achievements of de Kooning: An American Master that much more dazzling."
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America is a biography of George Armstrong Custer by T. J. Stiles. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Heather Clark is an American writer, literary critic and academic. Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).
