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Pulitzers go to Marable, Gaddis, and Greenblatt

[Pulitzer in History]

[Manning] Marable, a longtime professor at Columbia, died last year at age 60 just as “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was being released. Years in the making, the book was widely praised, although some of Malcolm X’s children objected to the troubled portrait Marable offered of the activist’s marriage to Betty Shabazz.

“It is so rewarding to see Manning’s work honored as a landmark achievement in the documentation of 20th century American history,” Wendy Wolf, associate publisher at Viking, said in a statement.

[Pulitzer in Biography]

Another long-term project, John Lewis Gaddis’ ”George F. Kennan: An American Life,” won the Pulitzer for biography. Gaddis is a Yale University professor and leading Cold War scholar who began work on the Kennan book in the early 1980s. The project was delayed by Kennan’s longevity. Kennan, a founding Cold War strategist and a Pulitzer winner, was in his 70s at the time he authorized the book. He asked only that Gaddis wait until after his death.

Kennan lived to be 101.

“He was a prize-winning author himself, so he would have been pleased,” said Gaddis, whose biography also won the National Book Critics Circle award.

[HNN Editor:  The Pulitzer Prize in General non-Fiction went to Stephen Greenblatt, author of "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern."  It's described by the Pulitzer committee as "a provocative book arguing that an obscure work of philosophy, discovered nearly 600 years ago, changed the course of history by anticipating the science and sensibilities of today.]

 
Read entire article at WaPo (AP)