Richard Powers's novel The Overstory and David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass are among the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners, each of whom receives $15,000. This year's book winners and finalists:
Fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers (Norton), "an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them." Also nominated were The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking) and There There by Tommy Orange (Knopf).
History: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster), "a breathtaking history that demonstrates the scope of Frederick Douglass' influence through deep research on his writings, his intellectual evolution and his relationships." Also nominated: American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson (Liveright) and Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press).
Biography: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Oxford University Press), "a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired." Also nominated: Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber (Knopf) and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot (Liveright).
Poetry: Be With by Forrest Gander (New Directions), "a collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the difficulties of expressing grief and yearning for the departed." Also nominated: feeld by Jos Charles (Milkweed Editions) and Like by A.E. Stallings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
General Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), "a classic American story, grippingly told, of an Appalachian family struggling to retain its middle class status in the shadow of destruction wreaked by corporate oil fracking." Also nominated: In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung (The New Press) and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (Milkweed Editions).
Drama: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, "a hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors' community to face deep-seated prejudices." Also nominated: Dance Nation by Clare Barron and What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck.