Books Examining America's Racial History Headline 2009 Pulitzer Prizes for Art - washingtonpost.com: Two works that probed America's complex and disfiguring racial history over three centuries were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in the letters, drama and music categories yesterday.
Annette Gordon-Reed's 'The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,' a multi-generational history of the family of Thomas Jefferson's slave Sally Hemings, won the 2009 prize for history. And Wall Street Journal editor Douglas A. Blackmon was awarded the general nonfiction prize for 'Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II,' which documented the systematic disenfranchisement, arrest and forced labor of African Americans in the South after emancipation.
Other winners were Newsweek editor Jon Meacham for his biography of Andrew Jackson; New York dramatist Lynn Nottage for her play 'Ruined'; poet W.S. Merwin, for his collection 'The Shadow of Sirius'; writer Elizabeth Strout for her short-story collection, 'Olive Kitteridge'; and Steve Reich for the musical composition 'Double Sextet.'
