Pulitzer Prize Winning Fiction
While working on word puzzles today (I’m a puzzle editor by day), I came across one about Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction work. Surely, I thought, I’ve read at least one Pulitzer-winning author or book. But, alas, I am apparently lacking in my Pulitzer knowledge, as I have not read a single winning novel. And it’s not much compensation that I have heard of most of them, nor that one is on my “to read” list.
Here are some of the more recent and the more well-known winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, listed alongside the year that they won. Have you read any?
* 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (currently #2 on independent bookstores’ bestsellers list) 
* 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
* 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
* 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
* 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
* 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
* 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
* 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
* 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
* 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
* 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
* 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
* 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
* 1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
* 1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
* 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Hmm … now that I think about it, I think I sort of read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was forced to write about it as a child, if that counts.

September 26th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I’ve read a few of these books. Earlier this year I started Oscar Wao because of all the wonderful reviews it had gotten, but I hated it. I finally returned it to the library without finishing it. The next day I heard it had won the Pulitzer. Maybe I’ll try to read it again someday but I doubt it.