Annal:1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
- 1997 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 1996 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1996 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 30.47
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling— does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures…
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
- 1997 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
Poet Kim Barnes grew up in Northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim’s father dug in, determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed.
In the Wilderness is the story of this poet’s journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we must all enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman’s coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.
Herman Melville: A Biography: Volume 1, 1819-1851
- 1997 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
The first of a two-volume project, this book by a life-long scholar of Melville’s life, works, and milieu pinpoints the facts of Melville’s life with great accuracy and completeness. Melville here appears amid the all-too-human hopes and anxieties that inspired and ensnared him during his early career, when he passed from the status of America’s first literary symbol to that of a still-young man who dared to write Shakespearean prose.
