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.
The Pulitzer Prize for History, administered by Columbia University, is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished book about the history of the United States. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year. The Pulitzer Prize program has also recognized some historical work with its Biography prize, from 1917, and its General Non-Fiction prize, from 1962.
Joseph John-Michael Ellis III is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award in 1997 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both books were bestsellers.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
James Fenimore Cooper was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century, whose historical romances depicting colonial and indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought him fame and fortune. He lived much of his boyhood and his last fifteen years in Cooperstown, New York, which was founded by his father William Cooper on property that he owned. Cooper became a member of the Episcopal Church shortly before his death and contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society.
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, writer, environmentalist, and historian. He was often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice. In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.
Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.
Winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for 1996 were:
Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
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.
William Cooper was an American merchant, land speculator and developer, the founder of Cooperstown, New York. A politician, he was appointed as a county judge and later served two terms in the United States Congress, representing Otsego County and central New York. He was the father of James Fenimore Cooper, who became a noted writer of historical novels related to the New York frontier.
David Michael Kennedy is an American historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale is an 1823 historical novel by American writer James Fenimore Cooper. It was the first of five novels published which became known as the Leatherstocking Tales. The Pioneers is the fourth novel in terms of the chronology of the novels' plots.
Alan Shaw Taylor is an American historian and scholar who, most recently, was the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution, and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The Albert J. Beveridge Award is awarded by the American Historical Association (AHA) for the best English-language book on American history from 1492 to the present. It was established on a biennial basis in 1939 in memory of United States Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927) of Indiana, former secretary and longtime member of the Association, through a gift from his wife, Catherine Eddy Beveridge and donations from AHA members from his home state. The award has been given annually since 1945.
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
The Burlington Company was a group of eight American investors involved in a variety of land transactions between 1768 and 1770, particularly in what is now Otsego County, New York. The company was named after Burlington, New Jersey, where the men all resided.
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.
