Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1987: Complete list of winners

The 1987 Pulitzer Prizes announced a lineup of winners that captured America grappling with its own history—both the personal and the national. David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference claimed the Biography prize, offering readers an exhaustive, intimate account of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential leaders. Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis won Fiction, while Rita Dove made history as the youngest poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with Thomas and Beulah, a stunning sequence that traces the internal lives of an ordinary African American couple across decades. These victories signaled that the Pulitzer Prizes were increasingly recognizing works that centered Black American experience and perspective—a shift that would reshape American letters.

Beyond the literary categories, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winners in History and General Nonfiction continued this theme of reckoning. Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution explored the demographic forces that shaped the American founding, while David K. Shipler’s Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land grappled with Middle Eastern conflict through intimate human narratives. On the drama side, August Wilson’s Fences represented a watershed moment for African American theater, a play that would eventually become one of the most performed works in American drama and cement Wilson’s place as a major American playwright.

Here are the complete 1987 Pulitzer Prize winners:

Biography

Drama

Fiction

General Nonfiction

History

Poetry