Pulitzer Winners Announced

The 91st annual winners of the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama, and Music were announced on Monday, April 16, by Columbia University. This year's fiction winner is The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf) -- a 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book, a 2006 October Book Sense Notable, the current Oprah Book Club Pick, and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

"Like many in the industry, we've been waiting a long time for Cormac to win this award," said Knopf Publicity Director Paul Bogaards. "He's a great American writer, and this is going to be an eventful year for Cormac. You have The Road, which just won the Pulitzer, it's also an Oprah Book Club pick, and later this year there will be the release of the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country for Old Men. Cormac is going to achieve critical mass."

Bogaards noted that since The Road is the latest Oprah Pick, the publishing house is already well positioned in the market with 230,000 copies in hardcover and 950,000 in paperback. Marketing materials will soon be available to booksellers.

The Road is about a father-and-son journey through a ravaged America. Nominating The Road for the Book Sense Picks, Joe Foster of Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado, said, "A nameless man and a young boy travel together in a post-apocalyptic world of dust and ash. With prose as sparse and bleak as this new world itself, McCarthy shows us the absolutes of humanity as the young boy struggles to maintain a sense of generosity and innocence in a world overrun by cannibals and thieves. McCarthy displays his genius once again."

McCarthy is the author of nine previous novels. Among his honors are a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1992's All the Pretty Horses.

Among the other winners in the category of Letters & Drama are:

• Drama: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire (Theatre Communications)
• History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Knopf)
• Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
• Poetry: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
• General Nonfiction: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Awards will be presented on May 22 at a luncheon at Columbia University. --Karen Schechner