Annal:2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- Score: 10.5
At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) explores a remarkable literary partnership—that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband’s art and a man who dedicated his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov’s, and there is Véra on the dedication page, front and center. But search for her elsewhere, and the woman to whom the author of Lolita was married for fifty-two years, who carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.
In a beautifully limned portrait, Stacy Schiff has now restored her to life. Schiff follows Véra Nabokov from her affluent St. Petersburg childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the streets of Weimar Berlin, where Véra makes a spectacular entrance into the life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian verse. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the celebrated author of Lolita, Véra proves to be nothing less than his full creative partner. She had a need to do something great with her life. And…
Clear Springs: A Family Story
- 2000 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.5
In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker’s Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman’s odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.
A multilayered narrative of three generations—Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents—Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club; from the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of…
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
- 1999 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- 2000 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.49
Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter, which Sobel has translated into English for the first time, Galileo’s Daughter is a book of great originality and power, a biography unlike any ever written on Galileo. Sobel, the author of the bestseller Longitude, brings Galileo to life as never before-boldly compelled to explain the truths he discovered, human in his frailties and faith, devoted to family, especially to his eldest daughter.
The voices of Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, echo down the centuries through letters and writings, which Sobel masterfully weaves into her narrative, building toward the crescendo of history’s most dramatic collision between science and religion. In the process, she illuminates an entire era, when the flamboyant Medici grand dukes became Galileo’s patrons, when the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and prayer was the most effective medicine, when the Thirty Years’ War tipped fortunes across Europe, and when one man fought, through his trial and betrayal by…
