Supposedly Fun

In my Pulitzer Prize Predictions for 2023, my heart wanted to see Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead win but my brain told me that Hernan Diaz’s Trust had a better chance. It never occurred to me that they would both win. For the first time, there was a tie for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and my brain nearly broke.

I usually give a bit of time before even considering a deep dive on recent Pulitzer winners, but in this case it feels like there’s a bit of urgency to do it now. For one thing, I’ve already read both of the winning novels–and fairly recently, so I’m capable of doing this without needing a reread. For another, I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions about how (or why) this happened. And since this is an unprecedented situation, I might as well do something unprecedented and release my deep dive the same week the prizes were announced.

This will take a different format from other deep dives because, well, there are two books to talk about. And since these wins are so recent, I’m not going to take a look back for a historical perspective as I usually would. I also won’t be questioning whether or not these books qualify as the Great American Novel. It will be up to future generations to decide that. I will say, though, that of the two I think Demon Copperhead has a better chance at being part of the Great American Novel conversation–both because of its subject matter and the fact that its author has already secured a legacy as a writer that I think will last into the future.

What Is Demon Copperhead About?

Here is the citation about Demon Copperhead from the Pulitzer website:

A masterful recasting of “David Copperfield,” narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.

From Pulitzer.org’s 2023 winners page

Moving David Copperfield from Victorian England to 1990s Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver tells a powerful story about growing up and coming to terms with what has happened to you. It is at once personal and political. It is both grand and intimate in scope. Demon Copperhead is a novel that shines a light on what it is like to survive when you are at your most powerless: underage, underprivileged, parentless, and poor.

What Is Trust About?

Here is the citation about Trust from the Pulitzer website:

A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.

From Pulitzer.org’s 2023 winners page

Told in four sections that shift literary style and radically alter your understanding of what came before, Trust embraces the dual meanings of its title: it can have financial connotations and it can relate to truth–whether or not you believe what you are being told. Each section grapples with the legacy of a legendary (perhaps infamous) financial tycoon from the early 1900s, married to an eccentric aristocrat. But how did they grow their fortune to such dazzling heights, at what cost did they keep it, and how did Benjamin use his power to try to shape his own legacy?

How Did This Happen?

The short, honest answer is this: we don’t know. And we probably won’t know, either.

The Pulitzer Prize as an institution is notoriously insular. They don’t reveal a lot about what goes on behind closed doors. The notes and discussions of the Board that decides the winners (based on submissions from the juries) are particularly top secret. The Board members probably have to sign serious Non-Disclosure Agreements because they are silent about what goes on in the room where they meet to discuss the finalists in each category–although the Pulitzer website itself notes that “Board discussions are animated and often hotly debated.”

Historically, that has been true. We can look back at the early decades of the Pulitzer Prizes and find a lot of drama. We know that Nicholas Butler, President of Columbia University from 1902 through 1945, essentially staged a coup to prevent Ernest Hemingway from winning a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1941. Why? Because Butler thought For Whom the Bell Tolls was offensive. Because of his efforts, no prize was given that year. We also know about Board members resigning in protest because they didn’t agree with the winner. We know about instances where jurors went rogue to advocate for a book that was not the consensus choice of the jury. One could be forgiven for assuming that the meetings of the Pulitzer Board are filled with more drama and power grabs than an entire season of Dynasty.

However; these situations were embarrassing for both Columbia University, which administers the Pulitzer Prizes, and for the Pulitzer Prize Board members. That is probably why the Board has become more and more secretive over time. They don’t want any dirty laundry aired in public.

It also means that the Board doesn’t really comment on anything. They don’t explain their decisions, they don’t respond to questions, and they don’t make statements beyond anything that is said in the prize announcement. Think back to 2012, when there was a wild backlash to the Board’s failure to name a winner in the fiction category. They’ve never attempted to explain what happened. The only details we have gotten came from the jurors for that year, who spoke out in defense of the process they had undertaken to present the Board with three finalists.

If the Pulitzer Board won’t respond to questions about that incident, it’s likely they won’t offer any explanation as to how we got the first-ever tie in the fiction category.

You might be wondering if the jury can explain. Unfortunately, they probably can’t. The jury selects the finalists and that’s the end of their role. According to the official rules, the chairperson of the jury can submit a report to the Board explaining their selections, but they are not supposed to rank the finalists or make an official recommendation anymore. The Board takes it from there. The jury from 2012 didn’t find out the Board hadn’t selected a winner until the rest of the world found out during the prize announcement.

All of that is just to say that all we can do is guess. I sincerely doubt we will get an answer from the Board about how (or why) the tie happened. If the Board does release a statement or if we get information, I’ll do an update.

So feel free to take everything I’m about to say with a grain of salt. It’s speculation on my part.

I talked about this a bit in my fever dream of a Pulitzer reaction video, but here’s what I think happened, divided into four steps.

Step 1: No Gaming

I mentioned in my deep dive on last year’s winner, The Netanyahus, that a lot of people tend to assume that the structure of the Pulitzer Prize causes fiction jurors to try to game the system in an attempt to control who the winner will be. Looking at the finalists, I don’t see a lot of evidence that this happens. But there’s no denying that each jury interprets their mandate differently. As a juror, do you have an obligation to select critical favorites or bestselling books that the public is probably already aware of? Do you use your platform to try to elevate a book or author you would like to see gain recognition? Do you attempt to honor an author who you think deserves to win a Pulitzer Prize but hasn’t yet? Do you offer up a book that you think feels politically or socially important for the current moment? Or do you do a combination of all of these?

Last year’s jury clearly had a preference for books that they considered to be lesser-known gems because all three finalists were relatively obscure to the casual reader. Even I, someone who talks about books online every week, had only heard of one of them. But that doesn’t mean they were trying to game the system–it just means they had specific criteria they used to consider the options.

You could potentially point to 2011 as a year that had a little gamesmanship because there were two heavy favorites that year: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Only one of them was a finalist, and that probably cleared the deck for Goon Squad to triumph. Admittedly, Jonathan Franzen isn’t for everyone (I DNF’ed Freedom and never looked back), and maybe the jury for that year agreed with me. Or maybe they made a path for Goon Squad by not including what they saw as its stiffest competition.

Something that feels refreshing about the finalists for 2023 is that it feels like the jury didn’t care about stacking the deck or using the platform to promote anything. It doesn’t feel like they cared about gaming the system. Because Trust by Hernan Diaz and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver were the 2023 version of Franzen v. Egan. They were the most consistently recognized books of the year. Both were among The New York Times Book Review‘s Top Ten Books of 2022 and The Washington Post‘s Top Ten as well. When both books popped up on both lists, I said that it felt like a battle royale was building for the Pulitzer: a true two-way race for the prize (and I still would never have guessed how accurate that turned out to be).

So step 1 is pretty simple: the jury didn’t game the system. They didn’t try to show a preference for one title over the other. They just made them both finalists and left it to the Board to decide. And that feels very refreshing.

Interestingly, it also set the stage for a deadlock.

Step 2: The Undeniable Case for Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver and Demon Copperhead have a lot of attributes that would make them catnip for a Pulitzer Board.

For one thing, there’s the fact that Barbara Kingsolver is a literary legend in the United States. She’s a previous finalist (for The Poisonwood Bible in 1999), and in the years since, her reputation has only grown. Every book that Kingsolver has published since 1993 has been a New York Times bestseller–that’s thirty years of consistent hits without fading away. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2000. She won The Women’s Prize in 2010 for The Lacuna (at the time, the Women’s Prize was still operating under the name The Orange Prize). The Poisonwood Bible was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. And Kingsolver founded (and funds) the PEN/Bellwether Prize, which is awarded to an American author for a work that addresses social justice. She’s even had not one but two books selected for Oprah’s Book Club: The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver is exactly the type of author who many people feel should have a Pulitzer Prize, but until now, she didn’t. That made her a prime candidate for a “career achievement Pulitzer,” recognition that is more about who she is and the career that she’s had than it is for the book itself. It’s not unheard of because both of William Faulkner’s Pulitzer wins came long after his most famous work was behind him, and (in my opinion) Louise Erdrich is a recent winner who fits the bill.

But here’s the thing: on top of Kingsolver’s already-stellar career, Demon Copperhead is a monumental achievement. It is a beautifully written, cleverly structured adaptation of a classic novel (something the Pulitzer has had a weakness for in the past with The Hours and March). The mandate for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is that it should go to an American author, preferably for a work that deals with American life. Kingsolver took a British Victorian novel and made it quintessentially American, giving it an undeniably Appalachian identity.

On top of that, Demon Copperhead addresses urgent political and personal topics with Kingsolver’s signature empathy: the erasure and exploitation of rural communities, the rise of the opioid crisis, abuse and addiction, the systemic problems of the foster system, and the difficulties of taking control of your own life when you were a kid who slipped through the system.

So if the Pulitzer Board wanted to recognize a previously unrecognized career: Demon Copperhead.

If the Pulitzer Board wanted to recognize the best book of the year: it’s arguably Demon Copperhead.

If the Pulitzer Board wanted to recognize a book with an urgent political or social message: Demon Copperhead.

And unlike when Louise Erdrich won for The Night Watchman, this doesn’t feel like empty calories because the book in question is so good. (And just so you don’t think I’m hating on Louise Erdrich, she absolutely should have won a Pulitzer in the past. It’s just that while The Night Watchman carries an important political message, it’s far from her best work–and I think there were better options that year).

Step 3: The Undeniable Case for Hernan Diaz

Meanwhile, Hernan Diaz was also a previous finalist, but for him it came in 2018 for his novel In the Distance. His career is much newer than Barbara Kingsolver’s. In fact, In the Distance and Trust are his only novels–and both of them were finalists for the Pulitzer (with Trust obviously earning him a win). Although Hernan Diaz is 50 years old, that still makes him an up-and-coming (and exciting) talent–which is also catnip for a Pulitzer Board.

But the case for Trust has a lot more to do with external forces. First, because Trust deals with issues of truth and the ways in which it can be altered in order to craft a narrative. That is something that has always been true and which, to some degree, has always been a concern–even before the social media age we live in right now. But it is a topic that has been given considerable extra weight since Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, which relied heavily on lies and so-called alternative facts.

Second, Trust is about extreme wealth and capital and the ways in which the people and institutions who have it are able to exert incredible influence–not just in society or economics but in how history is written. This is something that has been top of mind and controversial for many Americans since the financial collapse of 2008 and the Wall Street protests that followed in 2011. It was amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many Americans were displaced and left in desperate financial conditions while many wealthy people and corporations managed to grow their wealth even further.

Third, and most unpredictably, economic circumstances in 2023 have made Trust seem like even more of a topical and timely novel. In recent weeks, there have been bank collapses, talk of bailouts to prevent further bank collapses, and the United States is poised to default on its debt thanks to a debt ceiling standoff between Republicans and Democrats.

I don’t know when the jury hands the finalists to the Pulitzer Board. All I know is that according to the rules, the awards are handed out the Monday after they deliberate, but it’s reasonable to assume that the Board was reviewing the fiction finalists while all this was going on in the world.

Obviously, I don’t think Hernan Diaz feels pleased that Trust ended up being so topical. But there’s no denying that the news cycle became a perfect storm to prove to the Pulitzer Board that they needed to pay attention to this book.

Step 4: Deadlock Problems

So we’ve seen that there are incredibly solid cases to be made for two of the finalists. And I don’t mean to be mean to or overlook the third finalist, The Immortal King Rao. I’m sure there’s a solid case to be made for why it could have won as well. It’s just that with such strong cases for the other two finalists, it probably didn’t factor into the voting in a significant way. And at the end of the day, the tie was between the other two finalists, so here we are.

The rules that are posted publicly don’t say what, if anything, the Board is supposed to do in the case of a tie–all I can find is a reference made by Maureen Corrigan (who was a fiction judge in the infamous 2012 year), indicating that the prize is decided by a majority, not a plurality. That means that it doesn’t matter if a book gets more votes than its competitors unless that book also manages to get more than 50% of the Board to vote for it. You have to get half in order to win.

That probably means that while either Demon Copperhead or Trust may have managed to get more votes than the other, neither book was able to get the statistical majority needed to declare victory. I can’t find evidence of this, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but I feel like in my Pulitzer journeys, I’ve seen it said that a deadlock like this is usually solved by just not awarding a prize at all. This is probably what happened in 2012, but we may never know for sure.

Of course, it’s possible that the majority policy Corrigan referenced isn’t used anymore. The Board may have changed the way it votes and we as the public would not have to be informed of that.

Regardless of how we got to a deadlock, it’s clear that we got there. And if the usual policy for a deadlock is to walk away without a winner, it’s extremely likely that that has become an untenable solution for the Pulitzer Board. People were really upset when there was no winner in 2012. The publishing industry was not shy about criticizing the Pulitzer Board for failing to name a winner. The bookselling industry loudly pointed to sales figures showing how the Board’s failure hurt bookstores by denying them a proven method of boosting sales. The jurors for that year publicly spoke out and shamed the Board for not fulfilling their responsibility.

Back in the early days of the Pulitzer Prize, it was fairly common to skip a year. It happened three times in the 1970s. It’s unacceptable now, and what happened in 2012 proved that to the Pulitzer Board.

Therefore, the best solution to break the deadlock and avoid controversy would be to do something unprecedented: allow a tie.

Do I know for certain that this is what happened? No. Once again, I need to remind you that this is me speculating. If anyone has the receipts for what went on behind the scenes or how the rules work, please let me know. I would love to know.

Until we know better, to me it looks like two books made an undeniable case for why they should win, splitting the vote among the Board so neither could get a majority, and the Board decided to allow a tie in order to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2012.

Are These Novels Any Good?

Objectively, both are good because as I said earlier: both were the most consistently recognized titles of 2022. Subjectively, I only really like one of them.

Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead was my favorite read of 2022. You can imagine, then, that I love it. If you watch my reaction to the 2023 Pulitzer Prize announcement, I was extremely stressed because I desperately wanted Demon to win, and I felt convinced that Trust was going to take it instead. I freaked out when they both ended up winning.

What I love about Barbara Kingsolver is how humane and compassionate her novels are. They can brim with anger or frustration and not feel overbearing. And I adore how careful and clever she was in adapting Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. It was a semiautobiographical novel by Dickens that exposed a lot of the societal injustices he had experienced during his own coming of age and how he set himself on a path to becoming a writer despite them. Kingsolver proves to be a perfect match for this, bringing her own experience to make Demon Copperhead the same personal journey for her that David Copperfield was for Dickens.

Here’s how Kingsolver introduces the novel to readers:

[Demon] grew out of a real place where I live, the mountains of southern Appalachia. He speaks the language I love, and bears some of the same scars a lot of us carry around, if we’ve ever found ourselves on the wrong side of luck or love or safety or social approval.

But his damage runs deeper. This beautiful place has a history of poverty, and lately has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. None of this was accidental. For the last decade, whle I watched a generation of kids grow up orphaned or wrecked by addiction, I’ve tracked the news and learned how a pharmaceutical company singled out our region as the principal, vulnerable target for their literal poison pill. And this was just the latest in a long line of exploits that have gutted our land and people, taking out the spoils and leaving damage behind. It’s an astonishing saga, but not well known, because rural people and our problems don’t get a lot of coverage or sympathy in our mainstream media. Children, of course, have the least power of all. As much as I wanted to tell this story, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it.

“Dear Reader,” Barbara Kingsolver’s introduction to Demon Copperhead

She goes on to explain how a stay at the home where Dickens lived showed her a path to make people listen through the power of fiction and point of view.

Because I love this book, I’ve had some people tell me what they didn’t like about it over these last few months. To be honest, I feel like a portion of them misunderstand what Demon Copperhead is. Those complaints are that it’s episodic–and it is, because it’s adapted from a novel that was originally published in serial form–or that Kingsolver’s plotting is unbelievable–but Dickens created this plot, not Kingsolver–or some variation of that.

As an aside, even if you discount that David Copperfield was originally published in serial form, I think the story lends itself to an episodic structure. Demon gets kicked around to different places and never gets to properly land and settle in. Each new situation drastically alters his circumstances. If you feel disjointed by all his movement, imagine how he feels.

The other portion is people who have complained to me that it feels unrealistic that so many bad things happen to Demon Copperhead throughout the course of the novel. Please know that this is not a value judgment on people who have said this to me, but I feel like it reflects a lack of knowledge or understanding of what life is like for many kids who end up in the foster system. Their life is bleak. No kid ends up in the foster system because their life has been fine. I have been a foster parent and I have known a lot of kids who have been in the foster system. Their stories are not mine to tell, but they are very much in line with what happens to Demon Copperhead. And I don’t want to harp on this because again, I don’t think anyone who feels that Demon’s life is unrealistically bleak is a bad person. I just think they probably don’t know what these kids go through.

One of my neighbors is a legal advocate for kids who are in the foster system. I love her, she’s amazing. She has been reading Demon Copperhead very slowly for the last month. She loves the book, but she finds it so similar to situations she experiences in real life when she gets involved with these families that she frequently needs a bit of distance. If you don’t want to believe my experience, believe hers. Because that is how accurate Demon Copperhead is.

And some people don’t feel that the book is unrealistic, but they do feel that the novel is unrelentingly miserable. But I read this book and I feel hope. I feel love and compassion. I feel a burning desire to make things better in the future. I feel the desperate wish that people will read this and understand. I think about what Kingsolver said in her introduction: “As much as I wanted to tell this story, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it.”

If you don’t like it, I understand. But I love it.

Trust

Trust is a novel with four very different sections. As I said earlier, each section challenges your understanding of what came before. First, we read excerpts from a novel about a financial tycoon. Then, we read excerpts from a memoir by a financial tycoon, who appears to be responding to criticism from a novel that featured a thinly veiled version of him. As an aside, Diaz structures the novel in such a way as to suggest that the excerpts being featured are part of how this history is being framed to you, the reader. You are only getting portions of the story that have been selected for you in order to prove a point. Anyway, the third section follows a woman who has a surprising connection to the tycoon, who at this point has been dead and buried for a long time. The final section consists of diary entries.

I’m going to try to avoid spoilers, but unfortunately, that means I can’t talk much about the sections of the novel that I found the most interesting.

One of my problems with Trust is that I didn’t like the first two sections. That’s half of the novel. In fact, I was so bored that I seriously considered putting the book down and walking away. I texted a friend who had read Trust and asked him if the book got any better in the second half. He said it does, but that he was not sure it would be worth the effort. I did continue, and to my surprise, I absolutely loved the third section. And then I thought the fourth section was just fine. The fourth section depends to a degree on a twist (again, no spoilers), and I saw the twist coming early on in the novel. It wasn’t surprising to me, which meant that Trust ended with a whisper for me when it was supposed to end with a loud bang.

Needless to say, it isn’t great when you only really like a quarter of a novel. In my opinion, Diaz could have scrapped the first two sections completely. If he had expanded the third section, he could have easily incorporated the essential plot elements from the first two sections without making the reader labor through half of the book to get to the good stuff. I think you could make the third section the plot of the book and sprinkle excerpts from the novel and the memoir in between chapters. I even think he could have incorporated the fourth section once you get further along in the story–or even ended with the diary entries on their own. To me, that would have been a much more successful novel.

At the same time, I realize that would mean sacrificing the tricky structure of Trust, which is one of the primary things people who love this book praise. And I get it! Each section of this book is a prism: it takes the light, bends it, and changes it so you see something very different. I think Diaz is a good enough writer that he didn’t need the trick. Your mileage may vary.

To me, it’s just a lot to ask a reader to slog their way through half of a novel for it to begin in earnest. Therefore, I’m never going to love or be excited about Trust. But I do want to read more of Hernan Diaz’s work. And I do like the ideas behind the book. I like what Diaz is trying to say. I just wish I liked the book itself more.

Even so, I think the reason I’m okay with 2023 ending in a tie for the Pulitzer is because I don’t actually dislike Trust per see. I certainly would rather reread Trust than ever think about reading The Netanyahus again. I can respect Trust because I can understand what Diaz is doing, and I like it. It’s just a flawed package to me.

Who Is Barbara Kingsolver?

Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but grew up in Kentucky until the age of seven. At that age, her father moved her and her family to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work in public health–and I can’t help but wonder if that experience helped form The Poisonwood Bible many years later.

In college, Kingsolver studied piano before switching to biology and discovered activism, taking part in protests against the Vietnam War. Her writing career actually began with science writing while she lived in Tucson, Arizona. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.

Kingsolver’s writing frequently deals with locations that are familiar to her and reflects her activist work without feeling preachy. She is particularly passionate about the environment and social equity.

Who Is Hernan Diaz?

Hernan Diaz was born in Argentina but spent time in Switzerland until his family returned to Argentina after democracy was restored. He moved to New York City in 1999.

His first novel, In the Distance, was published in 2017 and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (losing to Andrew Sean Greer for Less). Right now, there isn’t a lot of information about him online but that could be because his career is relatively new–especially compared to Barbara Kingsolver.

He works at Columbia University’s Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures.

Are There Adaptations or Sequels of Either Novel?

Trust is set to be adapted into a limited series for HBO with Todd Haynes attached to direct and Kate Winslet attached to star. Hernan Diaz is also attached as an executive producer.

There are no current plans for an adaptation of Demon Copperhead.

What Was the Competition for the 2023 Pulitzer?

The only finalist that did not get to win is The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. It’s a debut novel that, like Trust, examines the role of capitalism in society. Unlike Trust, it blurs the line between genres, flirting with speculative fiction and dystopia to tell the story of a world run by a Board of Corporations and a family caught in the tide of history. I haven’t read it and at this time, I don’t plan to. But it sounds interesting.

Looking at other books that could have been in the mix, I loved Morgan Talty’s debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez (which, through linked stories, tells the story of a Native man and the painful legacy of trauma he and his family have inherited as they try to navigate life on the Penobscot Reservation). I also loved James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, but I can understand how a novel about a trans woman trying and failing to get on her feet after being paroled from prison would be an audacious choice for a Pulitzer Prize. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a flawed debut that nevertheless feels powerful (it won the National Book Award). Leila Mottley was probably a tough sell for Nightcrawling given that she was only nineteen when she wrote it. And Don’t Cry For Me is, to me, a wildly under-recognized novel about forgiveness, race, and family.

My personal finalists would have been Demon Copperhead, Night of the Living Rez, and I go back and forth between Don’t Cry For Me and Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta for the final spot. Don’t Cry For Me is my personal choice, so it probably has the edge.

Should These Books Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

You can probably tell that I would not have been anywhere near as torn if asked to choose between Demon Copperhead and Trust. I would just choose Demon Copperhead. It was my favorite book of 2022 anyway. I would choose it over any book from that year.

And I only liked a quarter of Trust, so it wouldn’t have been one of my finalists, but somehow I still feel satisfied with the way things turned out. For one thing, I haven’t felt passionate about a winning book in almost a decade. Demon Copperhead is the first time in a while that a book I was rooting for made it across the finish line. And I haven’t accurately predicted a winner since The Underground Railroad won in 2017. Trust stopped my losing streak. In a weird way, it’s the best of both worlds. I won with my head and I won with my heart.

But for the record, that heart belongs to Demon Copperhead.

Other Pulitzer Prize Deep Dives

His Family (1918) • Now in November (1935) • Gone With the Wind (1937) • The Grapes of Wrath (1940) • To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) • The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983) • Lonesome Dove (1986) • Interpreter of Maladies (2000) • Tinkers (2010) • Less (2018) • The Netanyahus (2022) • TIE: Trust and Demon Copperhead (2023)

Deep Dives On Pulitzer Years With No Winner

1917 • 2012