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Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction has been awarded since 1962 for a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category.
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Theodore White
Theodore Harold White (May 6, 1915 – May 9, 1986) was an American political journalist, historian, and novelist, known for his wartime reporting from China and accounts of the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 presidential elections.
Born May 6, 1915, in...
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Barbara Tuchman
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American self-trained historian and author. She became best known for her top-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude and first month of World War I which won...
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, an historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic...
Howard Mumford Jones
Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 - May 11, 1980) was a U.S. writer, literary critic, and professor of English at Harvard University.
Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.
In February, 1954 Mr.** Jones gave the dedicatory...
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Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Teale (June 2, 1899 – October 18, 1980) was an American naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930 - 1980....
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Will Durant
William James Durant (November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between...
Ariel Durant
Ariel Durant, born Chaya Kaufman, (10 May 1898 – 25 October 1981) was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.
Durant was born in Proskurov, (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United...
René Dubos
René Jules Dubos (February 20, 1901 – February 20, 1982) was a French-American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal. He is...
Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson (June 15, 1902 – May 12, 1994) was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son,...
John Toland
John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin - January 4, 2004 in Danbury, Connecticut) was an American author and historian. He is best known for his biography of Adolf Hitler.
Toland tried to write history as a straightforward...
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Frances FitzGerald
Frances FitzGerald (born October 21, 1940) is an American journalist and author. She is primarily known for her acclaimed journalistic account of the Vietnam War.
FitzGerald was the daughter of New York lawyer Desmond FitzGerald and socialite...
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for...
Ernest Becker
Dr. Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924, Massachusetts - March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer.
Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant...
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Robert Neil Butler
Robert Neil Butler (born January 21, 1927) is a physician, gerontologist, psychiatrist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who was the first director of the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Butler is known for his work on the social needs and the...
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David Brion Davis
David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is a principal authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center...
William W. Warner
William W. Warner (April 2, 1920 – April 18, 2008) was an American biologist and writer.
Warner was a 1943 graduate of Princeton University. During World War II, Warner served in the Pacific Theater of operations as an aerial photograph analyst with...
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E. O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology...
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first...
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe,...
Carl E. Schorske
Carl Emil Schorske (born March 15, 1915 in New York City) is an American cultural historian and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and...
Robert Coles
Robert Coles (born October 12, 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor at Harvard University.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he attended Milton Academy and Harvard College, where he studied English literature. He originally...
Tracy Kidder
John Tracy Kidder (born November 12, 1945) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer of the 1981 nonfiction narrative, The Soul of a New Machine, about the creation of a new computer at Data General Corporation. His book, Strength in What Remains,...
Susan Sheehan
Susan Sheehan (nee Margulies) (born August 24, 1937), is a U.S. journalist.
Born in Vienna, Austria, she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1983 for her book Is There No Place On Earth For Me?. The book details the experiences of a...
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Paul Starr
Paul Starr (May 12, 1949) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. He is also the co-editor (with Robert Kuttner) and co-founder (with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich) of The American Prospect, a...
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J. Anthony Lukas
Jay Anthony Lukas, aka J. Anthony Lucas (April 25, 1933–June 5, 1997), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, probably best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, a...
Joseph Lelyveld
Joseph Lelyveld (born April 5, 1937) was executive editor of the New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and interim executive editor in 2003 after the resignation of Howell Raines. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, and a frequent...
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David K. Shipler
David K. Shipler (born December 3, 1942) is an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He is an alumnus of Dartmouth College and served on the College's Board...
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Tina Rosenberg
Tina Rosenberg (born 1960 in Brooklyn, New York) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. She frequently writes for The New York Times Magazine
In 1987 she won a MacArthur Fellowship, which she used to move to South America. Her...
Neil Sheehan
Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan (born October 27, 1936) is an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series in the Times revealed a secret U.S....
Richard Rhodes
Richard Lee Rhodes (born July 4, 1937) is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently...
Dale Maharidge
Dale Maharidge (born 24 October 1956) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist best known for his collaborations with photographer Michael Williamson.
Maharidge and Williamson's book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for...
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Steve Coll
Steve Coll (born October 8, 1958 in Washington, D.C. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and writer. Coll is currently president and CEO of the New America Foundation. Prior to assuming that post on September 17, 2007, Coll was a staff...
Bert Hölldobler
Bert Hölldobler (born 25 June 1936) is a German behavioral biologist and Sociobiologist whose primary study subjects are social insects and in particular ants. He is a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on The Ants (1991) with Edward O....
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Daniel Yergin
Daniel H. Yergin (born February 6, 1947) is an American author, speaker, and economic researcher. Yergin is the co-founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy. It was acquired by IHS Energy in 2004....
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Garry Wills
Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a prolific author, journalist, and historian specializing in American politics, American political history and ideology and the Roman Catholic Church. Classically trained at Jesuit schools, he...
David Remnick
David Remnick (born October 29, 1958) is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. As a reporter for the Washington Post, he also served as the paper's Moscow correspondent. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The...
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Jonathan Weiner
Jonathan Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of non-fiction books on his biology observations, in particular evolution in the Galápagos Islands, genetics, and the environment.
Weiner graduated from Harvard University in 1976.
He won the 1995...
Studs Terkel
Louis "Studs" Terkel (16 May 1912 – 31 October 2008) was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common...
Richard Kluger
Richard Kluger (b. 1934) worked as a journalist before becoming an accomplished Pulitzer Prize-winning author and book publisher.
Kluger began his career as a journalist, working for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York...
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September 1937) is an American scientist and nonfiction author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular...
John McPhee
John Angus McPhee (born 8 March 1931) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer widely considered one of the pioneers of narrative nonfiction.
Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who helped kick-start the "new journalism" which remolded nonfiction in the...
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John W. Dower
John W . Dower (born 1938) is an American author, professor, and historian; his primary focus is modern Japan and U.S.-Japan relations. He is perhaps best known for his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which won the...
Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer (Hebrew: שאול פרידלנדר) (born Prague, October 11, 1932) is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA.
Born in Prague to German-speaking Jews, Friedländer grew up in France and survived the...
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published two novels, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and memoir. She is married...
Michael Williamson
Michael Williamson b. 1957, is an American photojournalist whose work has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes. With writer Dale Maharidge, he is co-author of the book And Their Children After Them, which received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non...
Herbert P. Bix
Herbert P. Bix is the author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, an acclaimed account of the Japanese Emperor and the events which shaped modern Japanese imperialism.
Bix earned his Ph.D. in history and Far Eastern languages from Harvard...
Diane McWhorter
Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist and commentator who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the...
Samantha Power
Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, in Ireland) is an Irish American journalist, writer, academic, and government official. She is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of...
Anne Applebaum
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born in Washington, D.C. 25 July 1964 (1964-07-25) (age 45)) is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe....
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Caroline Elkins
Caroline Elkins (born 1969) is a professor of History at Harvard University. She studies the colonial encounter in Africa during the twentieth century. In 2006, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for her book on British...
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Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright (born August 2, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, screenwriter, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. He is a graduate of...
Douglas A. Blackmon
Douglas A. Blackmon (b. 1964) is an American writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Based on a vast...
