Cormac McCarthy And Ornette Coleman Bracket an Eclectic Field

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Lawrence Wright has won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," a book he yesterday called "the most important thing I'll ever do in my life."

Cormac McCarthy won the fiction prize for his post-apocalyptic novel "The Road," giving the reclusive author a unique twofer this spring: Last month, McCarthy's novel became an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Newsmen Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff won the history Pulitzer for "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation." The biography prize went to Debby Applegate for "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher."

Saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman won the music prize for his album "Sound Grammar." Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire won the prize for drama for "Rabbit Hole."

Natasha Trethewey won the poetry prize for "Native Guard."

Reached at his home in Austin, Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker, said it was "all the more humbling" to win the Pulitzer in "a year of extraordinary nonfiction books" and one in which so many journalistic colleagues "have risked or lost their lives."

"The Looming Tower," Wright said, "wasn't written to win a prize" but out of a sense of "personal mission" after the 9/11 attacks. He wanted both to "educate people about the roots of al-Qaeda," which he believed essential to the fight against Islamic radicalism, and to demonstrate "the abject failure of the American intelligence community to protect us and the ways in which they failed."

"We have still not learned this lesson," he said.

Gene Roberts has known more than his share of Pulitzer glory -- the Philadelphia Inquirer, under his editorship, won an astonishing 17 journalism Pulitzers in 18 years -- but he had never won one personally before.

"Feels good," he said. "Off and on it took 16 years to do this book," he added, and when he and Klibanoff finally had their manuscript accepted by the publisher, "my real thought was, 'Free at last!' "

One reason they wanted to write "The Race Beat," Roberts said, was to highlight the role, largely ignored or forgotten, of black journalists in the civil rights movement.

"Arguably there would not have been a civil rights movement without the black press," he said, because "its reason for being was to confront inequality," and it helped condition a couple of generations of African Americans to expect change. Roberts also noted the importance of a tiny cadre of liberal white editors in the South. The states'-rights justification for segregation was "a myth," he said, "but it was a myth more easily exposed by native Southerners" than by outsiders.

"I'm a little flipped out," said Debby Applegate when she picked up her phone in New Haven, Conn. Applegate spent 20 years researching and writing her life of abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. As she dragged herself to the library day after day, she said, she would ask herself, "What do I have to do to make this book win a Pulitzer?"

She started as an undergraduate at Amherst, she said, where she had a scholarship job in the library and was asked to put together an exhibition about "notorious alumni." The charismatic Beecher (Class of 1834) fit the bill: She'd never encountered a historical figure "so irreverent, so funny, so modern, so open-minded." Once she started researching him, she couldn't stop.

What would she tell 21st-century readers who know nothing about Beecher? He was mainly known for three things, Applegate said. His "gospel of love" helped shift American Protestantism away from the fire-and-brimstone tradition predominant at the time. He was enormously influential in the anti-slavery movement. And he was a sexual adventurer who ended up the centerpiece of a famously titillating adultery trial.

"It's really a story about what happens when you bring sex, politics and religion together," she said.

David Lindsay-Abaire, who lives in Brooklyn, said the idea for his prize-winning play grew out of advice he got years ago from one of his teachers, playwright Marsha Norman. "She said, 'If you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you most,' " Lindsay-Abaire said yesterday. "Then I became a dad and I started hearing stories about children dying suddenly."

In "Rabbit Hole," a suburban couple try to come to grips with the death of their young son, who is run over by a car driven by a neighborhood teenager. This is a substantial shift from whimsical and satirical works such as "Fuddy Meers" and "Kimberly Akimbo." Lindsay-Abaire chose to "write a naturalistic play," he said, "because I had spent so much time making fun of them."

Nicole Kidman has optioned the movie rights, the playwright said. He is currently working on the lyrics for a stage musical version of "Shrek."

Ornette Coleman's prize for "Sound Grammar" represents the first Pulitzer given for a recording -- the award is traditionally given to the best composition with a live premiere in the preceding year -- and it is only the second time that a jazz artist has been honored. Wynton Marsalis won in 1997, though his "Blood on the Fields" was considered a classical composition.

Members of the Pulitzer board are known to have been unhappy with the way jazz and other popular music has been slighted in the past. No pop artist has yet been awarded the prize, though several musicals have won in the drama division.

Special Pulitzer citations went to science fiction great Ray Bradbury, 87, and (posthumously) to tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.

The mood was festive yesterday at Alfred A. Knopf, which published three of the five Pulitzer-winning books (by Wright, McCarthy and Roberts and Klibanoff). A fourth, the Applegate book, was published by Knopf's sister company, Doubleday, making it four out of five for Random House Inc.

That didn't mean, however, that anyone at Knopf could get the reclusive McCarthy on the phone.

"Tomorrow may come," spokesman Paul Bogaards said, "with Cormac blissfully unaware that he's won the prize."

Staff writers Peter Marks and Tim Page contributed to this report.