Annal:1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1990. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

1990 Pulitzer–Biography winner
Score: 10.4

In this intellectual biography Sebastian de Grazia presents a new vision of Niccolo Machiavelli that evokes, with uncanny precision, the great Florentine thinker’s presence. After providing an engrossing account of Machiavelli’s childhood and the period following his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to an examination of The Prince. The details of Machiavelli’s life — his home, journeys, fears and joys, friends, loves, and works — never cease to weave in and out of the narrative, as we read how his ideas gather power and coalesce into a unified vision of humankind and the world.

The Road from Coorain

Jill Ker Conway

1990 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
Score: 6.4

In A Memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood — a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart.

She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents’ thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a “man’s job” of helping herd the sheep because World War II had…

Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides

Reynolds Price

1990 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
Score: 6.4

Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, author of the bestseller Kate Vaiden and the recent Roxanna Slade, is one of the most accomplished writers ever to come out of the South. He is an author rooted in its old life and ways; and this is his vivid, powerful memoir of his first twenty-one years growing up in North Carolina.

Spanning the years from 1933 to 1954, Price accurately captures the spirit of a community recovering from the Depression, living through World War II and then facing the economic and social changes of the 1950s. In…