Annal:2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
- 2004 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 2003 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 20.54
The definitive biography of the mercurial Soviet leader who succeeded and denounced Stalin.
Nikita Khrushchev was one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev left a contradictory stamp on his country and on the world. His life and career mirror the Soviet experience: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, Khrushchev…
- 2004 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.54
James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science—how ideas order visible appearances, how equations can give meaning to molecular and stellar phenomena, how theories can transform what we see. In Chaos, he chronicled the emergence of a new way of looking at dynamic systems; in Genius, he portrayed the wondrous dimensions of Richard Feynman’s mind. Now, in Isaac Newton, he gives us the story of the scientist who, above all others, embodied humanity’s quest to unveil the hidden forces that constitute the physical world.
In this original,…
Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
- 2004 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.54
From the Author of Frida, the Moving and Heroic Story of One of the Central Painters of the Twentieth Century
Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky—and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the…
