Pulitzer Prize – Biography

2007
The Most Famous Man in America: the Biography of Henry Ward Beecher  by Debby Applegate (B BEECHER)
Now nearly forgotten, Beecher was an immensely famous minister, abolitionist and public intellectual whose career was rocked by allegations of adultery that made nationwide headlines. In this engaging biography, Applegate situates this curiously modern 19th-century figure at the focus of epochal developments in American culture. Beecher's mesmerizing newspaper columns made him one of the first celebrities of the nascent mass media. His antislavery politics injected a note of emotionalism into the debate that – with his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin – galvanized Northern public opinion. And by preaching a loving God instead of a wrathful one, the author contends, Beecher repudiated Calvinism of his youth and made happiness and self-fulfillment, rather than sin and guilt, the centerpiece of modern Christian ideology.

2006
American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (B OPPENHEIM)
In American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer's life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th-century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products. Rich in historical detail and personal narratives, the book paints a picture of Oppenheimer as both a controlling force and victim of the mechanisms of power.

2005 
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (B DE KOONING)
This sweeping biography, 10 years in the making, chronicles in fastidious detail de Kooning's rise from his humble beginnings in Rotterdam to his fame as an abstract expressionist and his descent into alcoholism and Alzheimer's.

2004
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era  by William Taubman (B KHRUSHCHEV)
Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman writes a thorough biography of one of the most complex and important political figures of the 20th century.

2003
Master of the Senate  by Robert Caro (B JOHNSON)
Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon B. Johnson continues. Master of the Senate takes Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his 12 years, from 1949 through 1960, in the United States Senate.

2002
John Adams  by David McCullough (B ADAMS)
Told by one of our country's greatest historians, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the extraordinary history of the birth of our country, seen through the lives of two extraordinary men: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

2001
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century  by David Levering Lewis (B DUBOIS)
Lewis has again analyzed the historical record with the utmost care to produce this second volume of his highly acclaimed 1993 biography (W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919) of the founder of the NAACP and Pan Africanist leader.

2000
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff*
Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' 52-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine – a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy.
*Wake County does not own this book

1999
Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg (B LINDBERGH)
A. Scott Berg lifts the veil of myth and mystery that has surrounded the aviator since his moment of triumph on May 21, 1927, when he landed in Paris, the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane. Berg was the first author to be given unrestricted access to the massive Lindbergh archives – more than 2,000 boxes of personal papers – and to be allowed to freely interview Lindbergh's friends, colleagues and family members, including his children and widow.

1998
Personal History  by Katharine Graham (B GRAHAM)
This critically acclaimed memoir tells the story of the woman who piloted The Washington Post through the stormy times related to the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and a pressmen's strike, managing to raise that newspaper to even greater heights.

1997
Angela's Ashes  by Frank McCourt (B MCCOURT)
The luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland.

1996
God: A Biography  by Jack Miles (231 MIL)
Former Jesuit Miles offers a detailed analysis of the nature and character of God as he appears in the Old Testament.