NEW YORK — Bob Dylan received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” a tragic but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize.
The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” which, like Diaz’s novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play “loosely autobiographical,” a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for “Time and Materials,” won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz’s “Failure.”
Other winners Monday: Daniel Walker Howe, in history, for “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848”; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945”; for biography, John Matteson’s “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.”
Dylan’s victory doesn’t mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang’s “The Little Match Girl Passion,” which opened last fall with a performance at Carnegie Hall.
