35 Best Pulitzer Prize Winning Biographies
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is unique in its focus. It is rather rare for a well-known literary award to have a biography category. This makes the prize winners even more exciting.
Every such book is "...distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author."
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is one of the original categories starting in 1917. Hence, there are plenty of titles to choose from.
We have shortlisted the winners based on Goodreads ratings so that you can enjoy best of the best.
If you love strong personal stories and unique perspectives, the following list is for you.
R. E. Lee: A Biography Series
The series has the highest goodreads average rating. R. E. Leeby Douglas Southall Freeman was the recipient of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was a richly deserved honor, for Freeman's biography of the Virginian that went on to become one of the most celebrated of all American biographies, a favorite of General George Marshall and President Dwight Eisenhower, among many others. Since his death, thousands of American soldiers have sought to emulate Lee's example of virtue, courage, and duty. This four-volume masterpiece traces Lee's life from his birth in 1807 at the ancestral Lee home of Stratford to his final years as the president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, where he was buried in 1870.
Volume One carries us from Lee's childhood through his youth as a cadet at West Point, his slow but steady advance in the US Army Corps of Engineers, his spectacular record under General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War, his superintendency of West Point, and so on up to the point where Lee has made the difficult and painful decision to resign his commission in the US Army in order to remain with his beloved state of Virginia...for him, his "nation".
Volume Two opens in March, 1862 with Lee back in Richmond after a lengthy absence. He was shocked by the chaos and panic evident in the Confederate capital. McClellan had assembled a superbly equipped army of over 100,000 soldiers which Virginians feared might invade at any time. In May, McClellan began to move his huge Army of the Potomac up the peninsula and so close to Richmond that church steeples were within his view. The situation seemed hopeless...
Volume three opens in May 1863 as Lee assessed his situation after the great Confederate victory at Chancellorsville and the loss of General Jackson. Lee quickly reorganized his army and headed north, hoping to inflict a war-ending defeat on the Union. But absent Jackson, his army was not the same.
Volume Four begins in March, 1865 with Lee's starving soldiers facing annihilation at the hands of Grant's enormous army. Surrounded, with all avenues of escape cut off, Lee honorably surrendered the remnants of his valiant Army of Northern Virginia at Appamattox on April 9. Having done his military duty to his people to the very best of his ability, Lee next asked himself, "What is now my duty?" Declining handsome financial rewards for the use of his name in various commercial ventures, Lee decided to share the misery of the people of Virginia and the South.
Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.
A captivating story of unlikely success, bought with hunger, determination, and hardship. Immigrant biographies will perhaps often offer such benefits. Few can hope to be as articulate and evocative as Michael Pupin's story of the long road from Idvor to New York, From Immigrant to Inventor.
Master of the Senate,Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.
The four novels in this Library of America volume show Wharton at the height of her powers as a social observer and critic, examining American and European lives with a vision rich in detail, satire, and tragedy. In all of them her strong and autobiographical impulse is disciplined by her writer’s craft and her unfailing regard for her audience.
In his extraordinary biography of the major political couple of the twentieth century, Joseph P. Lash reconstructs from Eleanor Roosevelt's personal papers her early life and four-decade marriage to the four-time president who brought America back from the Great Depression and helped to win World War II. The result is an intimate look at the vibrant private and public worlds of two incomparable people.
Oscar Wildeis the definitive biography of the tortured poet and playwright and the last book by renowned biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann. Ellmann dedicated two decades to the research and writing of this biography, resulting in a complex and richly detailed portrait of Oscar Wilde. Ellman captures the wit, creativity, and charm of the psychologically and sexually complicated writer, as well as the darker aspects of his personality and life. Covering everything from Wilde's rise as a young literary talent to his eventual imprisonment and death in exile with exquisite detail, Ellmann's fascinating account of Wilde's life and work is a resounding triumph.
Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned co-tsar at the age of ten. The acclaimed author ofCatherine the Great,Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend—including his “incognito” travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, his transformation of Russia, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, the robust yet gentle peasant, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, bold, unscrupulous prince who rose to wealth and power through Peter’s friendship. Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, tender and unforgiving, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life.
The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is possible with most writers; and there are times during the period of his greatest creativity when his personal as well as his artistic life can be followed week by week.
Samuel Johnson is a writer of such significance that his era — the second half of the 18th century — is known as the Age of Johnson. Starting out as a Grub Street journalist, he made his mark on history as a poet, author, moralist, literary critic, political commentator, and lexiconographer. We, as moderns, need to know this man, and W. Jackson Bate's formidable biography, with its uncanny depth and empathy, is the book that makes that happen.
From his beginnings as a journalist at age 16, to his retirement from public affairs at 82, there was no break in Benjamin Franklin's activity and accomplishments. A writer, inventor, and statesman, he remains unsurpassed in the range of his natural gifts and the important uses to which he put them.
Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh - renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II.
Charles A. Lindbergh captured the world's attention—and changed the course of history—when he completed his famous nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. InThe Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane. Eloquently told and sweeping in its scope, Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning account is an epic adventure tale for all time.
Jackson Pollock was more than a great artist, he was a creative force of nature. He changed not only the course of Western art, but our very definition of "art." He was the quintessential tortured genius, an American Vincent van Gogh, cut from the same unconforming cloth as his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and James Dean--and tormented by the same demons; a "cowboy artist" who rose from obscurity to take his place among the titans of modern art, and whose paintings now command millions of dollars.
Working closely with Muir’s family and with his papers, Wolfe was able to create a full portrait of her subject, not only as America’s firebrand conservationist and founder of the national park system, but also as husband, father, and friend. All readers who have admired Muir’s ruggedly individualistic lifestyle, and those who wish a greater appreciation for the history of environmental preservation in America, will be enthralled and enlightened by this splendid biography.
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance.The Returnis the story of what he found there.
In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted theWashington Postthrough the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.
Lewis B. Puller, Jr.'s memoir is a moving story of a man born into a proud military legacy who struggles to rebuild his world after the Vietnam War has shattered his body and his ideals. Raised in the shadow of his father, Marine General Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, a hero of five wars, young Lewis went to Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War and served with distinction as an officer in his father's beloved Corps. But when he tripped a booby-trapped howitzer round, triggering an explosion that would cost him his legs, his career as a soldier ended, and the battle to reclaim his life began.
This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.
Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.
The Pope and Mussolinitells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals.
Widely and enthusiastically acclaimed, this is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating but troubled figures of the twentieth century by the nation's leading Cold War historian. In the late 1940s, George F. Kennan—then a bright but, relatively obscure American diplomat—wrote the "long telegram" and the "X" article. These two documents laid out United States' strategy for "containing" the Soviet Union—a strategy which Kennan himself questioned in later years. Based on exclusive access to Kennan and his archives, this landmark history illuminates a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life.
A highly readable biography tracing the great highs and lows of his political career and personal life. From Houston's courageous actions as a junior officer under Jackson and his work as governor of Tennessee to his stint as Texas president, governor and finally political outcast for his stand on secession.
