Establishedin newspapermanJoseph Pulitzer ’s will , the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917 , with the first Pulitzer Prize for the Novelfollowinga year later ( it go to Ernest Poole forHis Family , andin the 1940s , the prize was renamed to award fiction in oecumenical ) . Since then , suchauthorsasAlice Walker , Willa Cather , Philip Roth , Michael Chabon , andToni Morrisonhave acquire ; here are a few otherauthorswhosebookshave cop the esteemed prize .
1. Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri co - wrote Good Book with a friend during recess as a 7 year old , but did n’t truly begin write until she was in graduate shoal , fit it in between school assignment and class . It was during those years that the phrase that would become the deed of her first book , Interpreter of Maladies , come to her : She had range into an acquaintance who was sour in a doctor ’s office , serving as a translator between the doctor and his patients . “ As I walked back home,”she later on call up , “ the phraseinterpreter of maladiespopped into my head as a way of describing what this person was doing . It lollygag long enough for me to jot the phrase down on a piece of music of paper . ”
After face up days of rejection of her forgetful stories , Interpreter of Maladieswas publish in 1999 — and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 . “ I always thought of the Pulitzer as something people won when they were deep into their careers,”Lahiri said . Her father advised her to “ take it graciously , keep it in its post , and move on . ”
2. Colson Whitehead
3. Edith Wharton
The panel ’s initial pick for the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel was Sinclair Lewis’sMain Street , but it wasrejected by the trusteesfor not meeting the standard of the prize ( namely , that the work be “ wholesome ” ) . The award rather go toEdith Whartonfor her twelfth novel , The Age of Innocence , making her thefirst womanto win a Pulitzer .
Whartonwrotein her autobiography that inInnocence , she had detect “ a momentary escape in going back to my childish retentiveness of a long - fell America … it was growing more and more evident that the world I had rise up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914 . ”
4. Jeffrey Eugenides
The Pulitzer jurycalledEugenides ’s 2002 novel , Middlesex — about epicene man Cal Stephanides , who , due to a genetic mutation called 5 - alpha - reductase deficiency , is assigned female at birth—“a imposing , utterly original legend of cross bloodlines , the elaboration of gender , and the deep , untidy promptings of desire . ” When the book was publish in 2002 , EugenidestoldThe Guardianthat he wanted to spell a medically precise portrayal of an intersex somebody , “ rather than a imaginary wight like Tiresias or Orlando who could dislodge in a paragraph . ”
The authorsaidhe had received many letters of thanks from intersex people , but the book was n’t without controversy : Emi Koyama , film director of the Intersex Initiative , wrotein 2007 that while “ the bookMiddlesexis beautifully written , ” Eugenides “ is definitely not an expert about intersex issues , and he did not meet with any intersex person before save the novel . ” The record ’s subject matter inevitably led to the source get asked questions about epicene in interviews — questions which Koyama say “ need to be directed toward hermaphrodite counsellor who are actually intimate with the topic , and not some novelist with modified cognition about the issue . ”
5. Junot Díaz
It took Junot Díaz11 yearsto write his entry novel , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , about an overweight Dominican boy survive in New Jersey make do with a category curse . Writing the book may have taken awhile , but it compensate off : Díazwonthe Pulitzer forOscar Waoin 2008 .
6. John Updike
7. John Kennedy Toole
The manuscript forA Confederacy of Dunceswasfoundby John Kennedy Toole ’s mother after he died by self-annihilation in 1969 . Determined to get the novel published , she approach a number of publisher ; finally , she went to author Walker Percy with the manuscript — and would not give up until he read it . As he laterrecalled , “ the lady was persistent , and it somehow came to pass that she stand up in my office handing me the sizable ms . ” He ’d hoped to read a few pages and be able to put it apart . But that was not the case : “ I read on . And on . First with the sinking feeling that it was not big enough to quit , then with a prickle of interest , then a growing hullabaloo , and finally an incredulity : surely it was not possible that it was so good . ” The novel was finally print in 1980 , 11 years after Toole ’s last , andwonthe Pulitzer the next year .
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