Pulitzer Prizes 2004

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Arguably the most storied literary awards in the world (after all, they date back to 1917), the Pulitzer Prizes are also virtually unique in that they recognise all aspects of the writing craft – from reportage through literature, poetry and even music. Up there with the Booker Prize in prestige, the Pulitzers still provide the benchmark for American literary achievement.

This year, the prizes in the artistic categories (fiction, non-fiction, drama, history, biography and poetry) seem to have had a strong bent towards revisiting the past; particularly America’s slave era.

The Fiction prize went to The Known World, by Edward P Jones. The book examines a little-known aspect of slavery: those free black men who themselves owned slaves. The story focuses on two generations of life in Manchester County, Virginia before the Civil War. It begins with Henry Townsend, a black man whose parents had purchased their freedom. They had freed their son, but Henry himself bought a slave as soon as he could afford one. Having built up a sizeable slave holding over the years, Henry dies, leaving them to his educated daughter Caldonia. The slaves speculate that Caldonia will free them; but when she doesn’t and instead breaches the “code” of slave-owning that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel.

The slavery theme was echoed in the History prize, which was awarded to A Nation Under Our Feet by Steven Hahn. Sub-titled “Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration”, the book charts the history of black struggles in America’s South for political and social rights against an entrenched and powerful opposition.

If the Fiction and History prizes were “paired”, the same could be said of the Biography and Non-Fiction prizes, both of which look at aspects of America’s old enemy from the Cold War, the Soviet Union. The Biography prize was awarded to Khrushchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman – a portrait of the Soviet leader who brought the world to the brink in the Cuban missile crisis. In the General Non-Fiction category, the award went to Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. The book, touted as the first full history of the infamous gulags in the Soviet Union, not only examines how they arose, but also how the Soviet economy came to depend heavily on the forced labour the system of camps provided.

In drama, the Pulitzer went to I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, who also penned Quills. The play, a one-person show, tells the tale of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated oppressive regimes in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany, while openly gay and defiantly in drag. The play also took out a Tony award.

The Poetry prize went to Franz Wright for his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. According to the respected Publisher’s Weekly, the book explores “the poet's troubled romantic life, his self-destructive past, his attraction to a Christian God and his difficult memories of his father – influential American poet James Wright”.

So what to make of all this. It’s tempting to think that in times of international troubles, America’s top literary prizes have decided to look back at that country’s own failings, and the forces that were once arrayed against it. That however may be over-simplifying things. Certainly, national and international events have always played a part in Pulitzer deliberations – a situation amplified by the accompanying prizes for journalism. But to say that the 2004 prizes are solely a reaction to international events would be to belittle the considerable literary merit of the winners.

David Edwards

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