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Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished biography or autobiography by an American author.
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Laura E. Richards
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards (February 27, 1850 - January 14, 1943) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a high-profile family. During her life, she wrote over 90 books, including children's, biographies, poetry, and others. A well-known children...
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Maud Howe Elliott
Maud Howe Elliott (November 9, 1854, Boston, Massachusetts – March 19, 1948, Newport, Rhode Island) was an American writer, most notable for her Pulitzer prize-winning collaboration with her sister, Laura E. Richards, on their mother's biography The...
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William Cabell Bruce
William Cabell Bruce (March 12, 1860 – May 9, 1946) was an American politician and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who represented the State of Maryland in the United States Senate from 1923 to 1929.
Bruce was born in Staunton Hill, Virginia, and...
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Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He is best-known for his autobiographical book, The Education of Henry Adams. He was a member of the Adams political family.
He was...
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Albert J. Beveridge
Albert Jeremiah Beveridge (October 6, 1862 – April 27, 1927) was an American historian and United States Senator from Indiana.
He was born in Highland County, Ohio and his parents moved to Indiana soon after his birth, and his boyhood was one of...
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Edward W. Bok
Edward William Bok (9 October 1863 – 1930) was a Dutch born American editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was editor of the Ladies Home Journal for thirty years. Bok is credited with coining the term, living room as the name for room of a...
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Hamlin Garland
Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
Born in West Salem, Wisconsin, he lived on...
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William Allen White
William Allen White (February 10, 1868 – January 29, 1944) was a renowned American newspaper editor, politician, and author. Between World War I and World War II White became the iconic middle American spokesman for thousands throughout the United...
Mihajlo Pupin
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin, Ph.D, LL.D. (4 October 1858 – 12 March 1935; Serbian Cyrillic: Михајло Идворски Пупин), also known as Michael I. Pupin, was a Serbian physicist and physical chemist. Pupin is best known for his numerous patents, including a...
M. A. Dewolfe Howe
Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe (August 28, 1864 in Bristol, Rhode Island – December 6, 1960 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American editor and author. He was assistant editor at Atlantic Monthly from 1893 to 1895 and Vice President of the Atlantic...
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Harvey Cushing
Harvey Williams Cushing, M.D. (April 8, 1869 - October 7, 1939) was an American neurosurgeon and a pioneer of brain surgery. He is widely regarded as the greatest neurosurgeon of the 20th century and often called the "father of modern neurosurgery"....
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Emory Holloway
Rufus Emory Holloway (March 16, 1885 in Marshall, Missouri – July 30, 1977) is an author most known for his books and studies of Walt Whitman. His Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative was the first biography of a significant poet to win the...
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Charles Edward Russell
Charles Edward Russell (1860—1941) was an American journalist and politician. The author of a number of books of biography and social commentary, in 1928 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas.
Charles Edward Russell...
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Burton J. Hendrick
Burton Jesse Hendrick (1870-1949) born in New Haven, Connecticut. While attending Yale University, Hendrick was editor of both The Yale Courant and The Yale Literary Magazine. He received his BA in 1895 and his master's in 1897 from Yale. After...
Tyler Dennett
Tyler Dennett (June 13, 1883, Spencer, Wisconsin – 1949) was an American historian and educator. He is best known for his book John Hay (1933), for which he won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
In 1900, Dennett enrolled at Bates College, then...
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Robert E. Sherwood
Robert Emmet Sherwood (4 April 1896 – 14 November 1955) American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, he was the son of the prominent American portrait artist Rosina Emmet Sherwood. He was the great-great-grandson of...
Ralph Barton Perry
Ralph Barton Perry (3 July 1876 in Poultney, Vermont - 22 January 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher.
He was educated at Princeton (B.A., 1896) and at Harvard (M.A., 1897; Ph.D., 1899), where, after teaching philosophy for...
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Marquis James
Marquis James (August 29, 1891, Springfield, Missouri – 1955) was an American journalist and author, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He served in the First World War, in France, 1917-1919. He worked on the staff at the American Legion Monthly from...
Odell Shepard
Odell Shepard (July 22, 1884 Sterling, Illinois - 1967) was an American professor, poet, and politician who was the Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1941 to 1943.
He graduated from Harvard University, and taught at the English department of...
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Carl Clinton Van Doren
Carl Clinton Van Doren (September 10, 1885–July 18, 1950) was a U.S. critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He was the brother of Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren.
Born in Hope, Vermilion County, Illinois, Van Doren was the...
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Ray Stannard Baker
Ray Stannard Baker (April 17, 1870 – July 12, 1946), also known by his pen name David Grayson, was an American journalist and author born in Lansing, Michigan. After graduating from Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), he...
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Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Ola Elizabeth Winslow was a writer and historian. She wrote a number of biographies, one of which, Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758; : A biography, gained a Pulitzer Prize in 1941.
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Carleton Mabee
Carleton Mabee is a Pulitzer-prize winning writer.
Russel Blaine Nye
Russel B. Nye (1913 - 1993) was an English professor who pioneered in American cultural studies. He is the author of a dozen books, and his book George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Nye received his bachelor's...
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Margaret Clapp
Margaret Antoinette Clapp (April 10, 1910 - 1974) was an American scholar and educator.
She was born in East Orange, New Jersey and graduated from East Orange High School in 1926 and Wellesley College in 1930. She taught English literature at the...
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Samuel Flagg Bemis
Samuel Flagg Bemis (October 20, 1891 in Worcester, Massachusetts – 1973) was a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer. He was also a former President of the American Historical Association and a specialist in American diplomatic history....
Merlo J. Pusey
Merlo John Pusey (1902 – November 22, 1985) was an American biographer and editorial writer who won the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1951 biography of Charles Evans Hughes.
A native of Woodruff, Utah,...
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29 , 1917 – November 22 , 1963), also referred to as John F. Kennedy, JFK, John Kennedy or Jack Kennedy , was the 35th President of the United States. He served from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Major events...
Douglas S. Freeman
Douglas Southall Freeman, (May 16, 1886 – June 13, 1953), was an American journalist and historian. He was the author of definitive biographies of George Washington and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Freeman was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the...
Arthur Walworth
Arthur Walworth (July 9, 1903 – January 10, 2005) is most noted as a biographer of Woodrow Wilson. He was born in Newton, Massachusetts. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Woodrow Wilson, Volume I: American Prophet.
He also...
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Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian, noted for producing works of maritime history that were both authoritative and highly readable. A sailor as well as a scholar,...
Richard Ellmann
Richard Ellmann (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of Irish writers such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), for which he won the National Book...
David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald (October 1, 1920, Goodman, Mississippi – May 17, 2009, Boston,Massachusetts) was an historian of the American Civil War.
Donald earned his B.Sc. degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his PhD in 1945...
Leon Edel
Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan....
Ernest Samuels
Ernest Samuels (May 19, 1903 in Chicago – 1996) was an American biographer and lawyer. He received his J.D. in 1926, but switched to literature in 1930. Nevertheless he did legal work as well for much of the 1930s. He might be best known for his...
Justin Kaplan
Justin Kaplan (September 5, 1925, New York) is an American writer and editor.
Kaplan received his bachelor of science degree from Harvard University in 1944. After pursuing a post-graduate degree for two years, he left graduate school to work for a...
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. He later wrote standard...
T. Harry Williams
Thomas Harry Williams (May 19, 1909–July 6, 1979) was an award-winning historian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge whose career began in 1941 and extended for thirty-eight years until his death at the age of seventy. A popular faculty...
Allan Nevins
Allan Nevins (May 20, 1890 - March 5, 1971) was an American historian and journalist, renowned for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as President Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and...
Joseph P. Lash
Joseph P. Lash is a Pulitzer-prize winning writer.
W.A. Swanberg
William Andrew Swanberg, 1907-1992, was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning American biographer. He is perhaps best known for Citizen Hearst, his biography of William Randolph Hearst. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1907 and earned his B.A. at the...
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R. W. B. Lewis
Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (November 1, 1917- June 13, 2002) was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for biography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction...
John Edward Mack
John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929–September 27, 2004) was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational...
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Walter Jackson Bate
Walter Jackson Bate (May 23, 1918 – July 26, 1999) was an American literary critic and biographer. He was born in Mankato, Minnesota.
He is known for two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, of John Keats and Samuel Johnson. Bate studied (under...
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger (October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007), was a Pulitzer Prize recipient and American historian and social critic whose work explored the liberalism of American political leaders including...
Russell Baker
Russell Wayne Baker (born August 14, 1925) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up.
Baker was the eldest of three children born to Benny...
Leonard Baker
Leonard S. Baker (January 24, 1931 – November 23, 1984) was an American Pulitzer Prize winning writer.
He won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (Oxford University Press,...
