Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published during the preceding calendar year that is ineligible for any other Pulitzer Prize. The Prize has been awarded since 1962; beginning in 1980, one to three finalists have been announced alongside the winner.^[1]

Recipients

Since its inception in 1962, the Prize for General Nonfiction has been awarded 66 times.^{[needs update][1]} An additional one to three finalists have been announced alongside the winner beginning in 1980. Two authors have won multiple prizes: Barbara W. Tuchman in 1963 and 1972, and Edward O. Wilson in 1979 and 1991. Additionally, two authors have been finalists multiple times: Steven Pinker (1998, 2003) and John McPhee (1982, 1987, 1991); McPhee won the Prize in 1999. Three winning works were also finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for History: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (1989),^[2] Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills (1993),^[3] and The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin (2020).^[4]

Barbara W. Tuchman won the Prize in 1963 for her book on World War I, and again in 1972 for her work on early 20th-century China.

Edward O. Wilson has won the Prize twice for his books on biology: once in 1979, and again in 1991 in collaboration with Bert Hölldobler.

John McPhee was a Prize finalist three times in 1982, 1987, and 1991, before winning in 1999.

Winners and finalists^[1]

Year	Author(s)	Book	Award
1962	Theodore H. White	The Making of the President 1960	Winner
1963	Barbara W. Tuchman	The Guns of August	Winner
1964	Richard Hofstadter	Anti-intellectualism in American Life	Winner
1965	Howard Mumford Jones	O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years	Winner
1966	Edwin Way Teale	Wandering Through Winter: A Naturalist's Record of a 20,000-Mile Journey Through the North American Winter	Winner
1967	David Brion Davis	The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture	Winner
1968	Will Durant and Ariel Durant	The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution	Winner
1969	René Jules Dubos	So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events	Winner
	Norman Mailer	The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History	Winner
1970	Erik H. Erikson	Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence	Winner
1971	John Toland	The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945	Winner
1972	Barbara W. Tuchman	Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45	Winner
1973	Robert Coles	Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III	Winner
	Frances FitzGerald	Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam	Winner
1974	Ernest Becker	The Denial of Death	Winner
1975	Annie Dillard	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek	Winner
1976	Robert N. Butler	Why Survive? Being Old in America	Winner
1977	William W. Warner	Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay	Winner
1978	Carl Sagan	The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence	Winner
1979	Edward O. Wilson	On Human Nature	Winner
1980	Douglas R. Hofstadter	Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid	Winner
	Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar	The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination	Finalist
	Lewis Thomas	The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher	Finalist
1981	Carl E. Schorske	Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture	Winner
	Maxine Hong Kingston	China Men	Finalist
	William Manchester	Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War	Finalist
	Marshall Frady	Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey	Finalist
1982	Tracy Kidder	The Soul of a New Machine	Winner
	John McPhee	Basin and Range	Finalist
	Diana Trilling	Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor	Finalist
1983	Susan Sheehan	Is There No Place on Earth for Me?	Winner
	Diane Johnson	Terrorists and Novelists	Finalist
	Jonathan Schell	The Fate of the Earth	Finalist
1984	Paul Starr	The Social Transformation of American Medicine	Winner
	Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer	Conversations with the Enemy	Finalist
	Susan Jacoby	Wild Justice	Finalist
1985	Studs Terkel	The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two	Winner
	Donald Keene	Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era	Finalist
	Jonathan Kwitny	Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World	Finalist
1986	J. Anthony Lukas	Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families	Winner
	Joseph Lelyveld	Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White	Winner
	Robert N. Bellah	Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life	Finalist
1987	David K. Shipler	Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land	Winner
	Cyra McFadden	Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir	Finalist
	John McPhee	Rising from the Plains	Finalist
1988	Richard Rhodes	The Making of the Atomic Bomb	Winner
	James Gleick	Chaos: Making a New Science	Finalist
	Daniel Callahan	Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society	Finalist
1989	Neil Sheehan	A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam	Winner
	Timothy Ferris	Coming of Age in the Milky Way	Finalist
	McGeorge Bundy	Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years	Finalist
	Howard Kohn	The Last Farmer	Finalist
1990	Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson	And Their Children After Them	Winner
	David Fromkin	A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922	Finalist
	Stephen Jay Gould	Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History	Finalist
1991	Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson	The Ants	Winner
	John McPhee	Looking for a Ship	Finalist
	William duBuys and Alex Harris	River of Traps: A Village Life	Finalist
1992	Daniel Yergin	The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power	Winner
	Andre Dubus	Broken Vessels	Finalist
	Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall	Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics	Finalist
1993	Garry Wills	Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America	Winner
	Susan Griffin	A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War	Finalist
	Richard Rodriguez	Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father	Finalist
	Anne Matthews	Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains	Finalist
1994	David Remnick	Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire	Winner
	Peter Gay	The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud	Finalist
	John Lukacs	The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age	Finalist
1995	Jonathan Weiner	The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time	Winner
	Sherwin B. Nuland	How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter	Finalist
	John Berendt	Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story	Finalist
1996	Tina Rosenberg	The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism	Winner
	Daniel C. Dennett	Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life	Finalist
	Lawrence Weschler	Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology	Finalist
1997	Richard Kluger	Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris	Winner
	Cynthia Ozick	Fame and Folly	Finalist
	Samuel G. Freedman	The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond	Finalist
1998	Jared Diamond	Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies	Winner
	Steven Pinker	How the Mind Works	Finalist
	Jon Krakauer	Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster	Finalist
1999	John McPhee	Annals of the Former World	Winner
	Elliott Currie	Crime and Punishment in America	Finalist
	Judith Rich Harris	The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do	Finalist
2000	John W. Dower	Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II	Winner
	Scott Weidensaul	Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds	Finalist
	Brian Greene	The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory	Finalist
2001	Herbert P. Bix	Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan	Winner
	Dave Eggers	A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	Finalist
	Ted Conover	Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing	Finalist
2002	Diane McWhorter	Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution	Winner
	Andrew Solomon	The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression	Finalist
	David Halberstam	War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals	Finalist
2003	Samantha Power	"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide	Winner
	Ellen Meloy	The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit	Finalist
	Steven Pinker	The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature	Finalist
2004	Anne Applebaum	Gulag: A History	Winner
	Steven Nadler	Rembrandt's Jews	Finalist
	Dana Priest	The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military	Finalist
2005	Steve Coll	Ghost Wars	Winner
	Suketu Mehta	Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found	Finalist
	Luis Alberto Urrea	The Devil's Highway: A True Story	Finalist
2006	Caroline Elkins	Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya	Winner
	Tony Judt	Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945	Finalist
	George Packer	The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq	Finalist
2007	Lawrence Wright	The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11	Winner
	Pete Earley	Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness	Finalist
	Thomas E. Ricks	Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq	Finalist
2008	Saul Friedländer	The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945	Winner
	Allan Brandt	The Cigarette Century	Finalist
	Alex Ross	The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century	Finalist
2009	Douglas A. Blackmon	Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II	Winner
	Arthur Herman	Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age	Finalist
	William I. Hitchcock	The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe	Finalist
2010	David E. Hoffman	The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy	Winner
	John Cassidy	How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities	Finalist
	Robert Wright	The Evolution of God	Finalist
2011	Siddhartha Mukherjee	The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer	Winner
	S.C. Gwynne	Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History	Finalist
	Nicholas G. Carr	The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains	Finalist
2012	Stephen Greenblatt	The Swerve: How the World Became Modern	Winner
	Diane Ackerman	One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing	Finalist
	Mara Hvistendahl	Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men	Finalist
2013	Gilbert King	Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America	Winner
	Katherine Boo	Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity	Finalist
	David George Haskell	The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature	Finalist
2014	Dan Fagin	Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation	Winner
	Gary J. Bass	The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide	Finalist
	Fred Kaplan	The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War	Finalist
2015	Elizabeth Kolbert	The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History	Winner
	Evan Osnos	Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China	Finalist
	Anand Gopal	No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes	Finalist
2016	Joby Warrick	Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS	Winner
	Ta-Nehisi Coates	Between the World and Me	Finalist
	Carla Power	If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran	Finalist
2017	Matthew Desmond	Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City	Winner
	John Donvan and Caren Zucker	In a Different Key: The Story of Autism	Finalist
	Micki McElya	The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery	Finalist
2018	James Forman Jr.	Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America	Winner
	Suzy Hansen	Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World	Finalist
	Richard O. Prum	The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us	Finalist
2019	Eliza Griswold	Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America	Winner
	Bernice Yeung	In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers	Finalist
	Elizabeth Rush	Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore	Finalist
2020	Greg Grandin	The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America	Winner
	Anne Boyer	The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care	Winner
	Louise Aronson	Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life	Finalist
	Albert Woodfox with Leslie George	Solitary	Finalist
2021	David Zucchino	Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy	Winner
	Cathy Park Hong	Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning	Finalist
	Sierra Crane Murdoch	Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country	Finalist
2022	Andrea Elliott	Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City	Winner
	Carla Power	Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism	Finalist
	Joshua Prager	The Family Roe: An American Story	Finalist
2023	Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa	His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice	Winner
	Jing Tsu	Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern	Finalist
	David George Haskell	Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction	Finalist
	Linda Villarosa	Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation	Finalist
2024	Nathan Thrall	A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy	Winner
	John Vaillant	Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World	Finalist
	Siddharth Kara	Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives	Finalist

See also

• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
• Pulitzer Prize for History

References

1. "General Nonfiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on March 18, 2021. Retrieved March 24, 2021.
2. "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan (Random House)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 26, 2021.
3. "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 26, 2021.
4. "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on May 4, 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2021.

External links

• Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction official website