Annal:1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

From AwardAnnals

Jump to: navigation, search

Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

Garry Wills

The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.

By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized…

 

A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

Susan Griffin

Written by one of America’s most innovative and articulate feminists, this book illustrates how childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspirations, and public personae all assume undeniable roles in the causes and effects of war.

 

Where the Buffalo Roam

Anne Matthews

On computer printouts, this brainchild of a faculty couple, he a land-use expert and she a geographer, sounds intellectually inspired but of course impractical, a pipe dream; yet when the calmly audacious plan of Frank and Deborah Popper to return millions of devastated acres in ten Plains states to their natural condition and to the buffalo was described in an article by Anne Matthews in the New York Times Magazine in the summer of 1990, the reaction was international and explosive.

Where the Buffalo Roam is the first and fascinating account of…

 

Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father

Richard Rodriguez

When I was fourteen and my father was fifty, we toyed with the argument that had once torn Europe, South from North, Catholic from Protestant, as we polished the blue DeSoto. “Life is harder than you think, boy.” “You’re thinking of Mexico Papa.” “You’ll see.”

A fragment of dialogue can summarize the “argument” of Richard Rodriguez’s new book, though the book contains five centuries, beginning with the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes; ending in 1992, in San Francisco—an American Asian city, during the years of plague. In Days of Obligation, Mexico…

 
Personal tools