Nineteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction, biography and history, which had two winners.
Fiction
Winner
James, by Percival Everett
Everett’s reimagining of “Huckleberry Finn” is a subversive homage to Mark Twain’s classic novel, as narrated by the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi. In “James,” Everett endows his title character (known as Jim in Twain’s book) with a rich intellectual life, deep curiosity and world-weariness that comes from trying to stay alive in the South. There are episodes of soul-deadening brutality, absurd satire and even philosophical treatises, but “James” reads with the fleetness of an adventure story. One of the most decorated releases of 2024, it also won the National Book Award for fiction and earned a place on the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the year list.
Doubleday
Finalist: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel
This debut novel zeros in on eight female boxing contestants who converge in Reno, Nev., for a teenage national championship. Bullwinkel follows them well after the events of the tournament, tracing the eventual course of their lives. Our critic Dwight Garner made clear his admiration for the author, writing in his review: “Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.”
Viking
Finalist: Mice, 1961, by Stacey Levine
The story of two orphaned sisters in Cold-War-era America, Jody and Mice (nicknamed so for her unusual appearance and mannerisms), is told by their housekeeper, as their neighborhood prepares for an all-out bash.
Verse Chorus Press
Finalist: The Unicorn Woman, by Gayl Jones
A World War II veteran falls helplessly in love with a Black woman he spies at a carnival, where she is among the sideshow attractions owing to the regal, spiraled horn sprouting from her forehead. Jones is among the most influential Black authors writing today, whose work helps reframe questions of identity, race and sexuality. Her 2021 novel “Palmares” — her first in 22 years — was also a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Beacon Press
History
Winner
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal
The author, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, draws on oral and written records to tell the stories of hundreds of Indigenous nations that live in what is now the United States. “Native Nations” also received the Bancroft Prize, among the most distinguished awards for works examining American history.
Random House
Winner
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, by Edda L. Fields-Black
In her account of the Combahee River Raid, Fields-Black examines a lesser-known chapter of Harriet Tubman’s life, as a leader in a military operation that liberated some 730 enslaved people from plantations in 1863. Fields-Black — a descendant of a formerly enslaved man who fought in the raid — draws on extensive documents, among them Tubman’s U.S. Civil War pension file, to reveal how Tubman commanded a group of scouts and spies to lead military expeditions during the war.
Oxford University Press
Finalist: Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, by Seth Rockman
The concept of the agrarian South and industrialist North is an oversimplification, argues Rockman, a historian at Brown University. Looking at the objects integral to the practice of slavery — whips, shoes, shovels, hats — that were manufactured in the North before making their way to the South, he examines how the American economy was organized around enslavement.
University of Chicago Press
In his sweeping narrative of intellectual and scientific rivalry, Roberts explores the intertwined legacies of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist and physician who is known as the founding father of taxonomy, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an aristocratic French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. Both men set out to catalog and define life on earth, but had wildly different approaches and philosophies. Roberts makes the case that Buffon, while less well-known than Linnaeus, had greater and more lasting insights, among them his beliefs that racial differences are superficial and that living creatures are shaped by their environments.
Random House
Finalist: John Lewis: A Life, by David Greenberg
Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, traces the life of the Civil Rights icon John Lewis from his childhood in rural Alabama to his ascent to the halls of Congress, where he became a powerful advocate for racial and economic equality. Greenberg draws on extensive interviews with 275 people who knew Lewis, as well as previously unseen documents, including F.B.I. files, to create what a New York Times review called a “panoramic and richly insightful biography.”
Simon & Schuster
Finalist: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, by Amy Reading
In her meticulously researched biography, Reading paints a portrait of the influential and trailblazing New Yorker editor Katharine White. She joined the magazine in 1925 and helped transform it during her 36 years at the publication, cultivating the careers of women writers like Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford and Nadine Gordimer.
Mariner Books
Winner
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls
To better understand three generations of women in her Chinese American family, the author embarked on a book project despite never having drawn comics and not speaking Chinese. As Hulls dove into the lives of her grandmother — a journalist who fled Shanghai for Hong Kong and wrote a best-selling memoir Hulls couldn’t read — and her mother, who attended boarding school in Hong Kong before coming to the United States in 1970, she could appreciate both her immense curiosity and feelings of alienation.
MCD Books
Finalist: Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller
This devastating account details the death of Fuller’s 21-year-old son, named Fi, and the grief that sent her into a tailspin. Despite its frankness about the heartbreak of mourning an adult child, a vivid picture of a “smart, hilarious, earnest, self-aware” young man emerges.
Grove Press
Finalist: I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante
In her 60s, the author, a longtime cultural critic and writer, decided to transition genders: an attempt to seize the “parallel life” she feared was passing her by. As she recounts her story, the book doubles as a study of a bygone 1970s New York. The Book Review named this memoir one of the 10 Best Books of 2024.
Penguin Press
General Nonfiction
To write this exhaustive account based on two decades of research, Nathans, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, combed through K.G.B. case files, unpublished diaries and private correspondence. While many have dated the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism to the 1980s, he makes the case that opposition to Soviet oppression began decades earlier.
Princeton University Press
Finalist: Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan
Over several decades, tens of thousands of Guatemalan children were forcefully and illegally taken from their families and put up for adoption. Many of those children were from Indigenous families and many of them ended up in the United States. Nolan, a professor at Boston University, digs deep into a tragic outgrowth of the almost 40-year Guatemalan civil war.
Harvard University Press
Finalist: I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, by Rollo Romig
In 2017, Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and outspoken critic of India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, was assassinated outside her home in Bangalore. Romig, who wrote about the crime for The New York Times Magazine in 2019, has expanded the story into a book that, among other things, “paints a full picture of the social and professional world that convulsed in the wake of Gauri’s death,” according to our reviewer.
Penguin Books
Poetry
Winner
New and Selected Poems, by Marie Howe
Culling work from Howe’s four earlier books into a generous selection of 111 poems, this career retrospective highlights her gift, from her 1987 debut all the way through to the new material here, for mixing the mundane and the transcendent. In “What the Living Do,” addressed to a dead brother, the speaker recites a litany of everyday hassles — a clogged sink, a dropped bag of groceries — and connects it to “What you called that yearning./What you finally gave up.” Even the numerous biblically themed poems are grounded in concrete detail: “Magdalene — The Seen Devils,” for instance, combines a checklist of common gripes (“The laundry was never finally done”) with the devastating losses we daily bear: “the way my mother looked when she was dying/the sound she made.” This overview seems sure to seal Howe’s reputation as one of the major poets of her generation.
Norton
Finalist: Bluff, by Danez Smith
Smith’s poetry balances a delight in the possibilities of language with an innate skepticism about its use in the world; here is a poet who nurses the tension between art and action and exhorts readers to acknowledge injustice while appreciating the chaotic nature of human existence. “In these searching, stunning poems,” our reviewer wrote, “Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives.”
Graywolf Press
An Authentic Life, by Jennifer Chang
True to her title, Chang uses the poems in “An Authentic Life” to hold her experiences against various received wisdoms, as a way to challenge convention and insist on authenticity. The topics range widely — war, religion, patriarchy, literary criticism — but the methods are the same: Chang cites some snippet she has learned or heard (“my father turns philosophical again/which is to say wandering away from any self”), then wanders freely to debunk it, deploying her arguments with flashes of brilliant wit, flights of vivid imagery and rigorous self-questioning.
Copper Canyon Press
