Arts Pulitzers Make History the Big Winner

"We're freaking out here," said poetry winner Emerson, who teaches at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. "It was a very big surprise." The author of three books of poetry, Emerson said "Late Wife" is much more personal than her other work.

The collection includes what she called "a series of epistles to my ex-husband," a section of poems in which she experiences being alone as an "emotional convalescence," and a series of letters, in sonnet form, to her new husband, whose first wife died of lung cancer.

The work is about "having a wonderful new relationship in the face of loss," she said.

Brooks is the second Pulitzer winner in her household. Her husband, Tony Horwitz, won a journalism Pulitzer in 1995 for a Wall Street Journal series on low-wage work in America.

Currently on fellowship at Harvard, she found some of the inspiration for "March" at home in Waterford, Va., a rural village where there were "bullet holes in the bricks of the local church where a Civil War skirmish had taken place," as she noted on her Web site, and where "a Union soldier's belt buckle was unearthed in our back yard."

"March" -- not to be confused with E.L. Doctorow's Civil War novel "The March," which was a Pulitzer finalist -- takes its name from Brooks's main character. He is "a thirty-nine-year-old vegetarian preacher," as the New Yorker put it, "whom many readers will recognize as the largely absent father of Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women.' "

Yehudi Wyner's piano concerto "Chiavi in Mano" was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 2005. Richard Dyer, reviewing the premiere for the Boston Globe, called the work "full of surprises . . . from Baroque briskness through Prokofievian percussive motor rhythms to torch song, jazz, rock, and honky-tonk with washboard accompaniment, all viewed through the lens of a personal, flexible, and highly chromatic musical language."

The Pulitzer committee also honored the immortal Thelonious Monk posthumously for what it called "a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz."

In keeping with the year's historical theme, the committee also gave a special citation to Edmund S. Morgan for "a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century."

Staff writer Tim Page contributed to this report.