Pulitzer Prizes 1990s: A decade of winners

The 1990s were a transformative moment for the Pulitzer Prizes, a decade when American literature seemed determined to wrestle with its own identity and history. From the opening years with Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson—both bringing Latino and African American narratives to the prize’s center stage—through to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours at decade’s end, these awards documented a literary landscape increasingly committed to pluralism and formal experimentation. The decade saw the Pulitzer Prizes become not just arbiters of literary excellence but barometers of what American culture was reading, thinking about, and grappling with.

What strikes you looking back is how often the decade’s winners turned to biography and history as urgent forms of inquiry. David McCullough’s Truman and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes both became cultural phenomena, while Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg demonstrated that historical writing could be as literary and revelatory as fiction. Meanwhile, drama expanded its horizons with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, proving the stage was where the most vital conversations about American identity were happening. Even the nonfiction winners—Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch—approached their subjects with the narrative drive of novels.

This retrospective captures a decade when the Pulitzer Prizes seemed to embrace both innovation and tradition, when writers across every category were asking fundamental questions about who gets to tell America’s story. Explore the full list of 1990s Pulitzer Prize winners below.

1990

Biography

• Machiavelli in Hell by Sebastian de Grazia

Drama

• The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Fiction

• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

General Nonfiction

• And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson

History

• In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines by Stanley Karnow

Poetry

• The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic

1991

Biography

• Jackson Pollock by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

Drama

• Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon

Fiction

• Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

General Nonfiction

• The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson

History

• A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Poetry

• Near Changes by Mona Van Duyn

1992

Biography

• Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet by Lewis B. Puller

Drama

• The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan

Fiction

• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

General Nonfiction

• The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

History

• The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark E. Neely

Poetry

• Selected Poems by James Tate

1993

Biography

• Truman by David McCullough

Drama

• Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

Fiction

• A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

General Nonfiction

• Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills

History

• The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

Poetry

• The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

1994

Biography

• W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919 by David Levering Lewis

Drama

• Three Tall Women by Edward Albee

Fiction

• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

General Nonfiction

• Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Poetry

• Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa

1995

Biography

• Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan D. Hedrick

Drama

• The Young Man From Atlanta by Horton Foote

Fiction

• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

General Nonfiction

• The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time by Jonathan Weiner

History

• No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Poetry

• The Simple Truth by Philip Levine

1996

Biography

• God: A Biography by Jack Miles

Drama

• Rent by Jonathan Larson

Fiction

• Independence Day by Richard Ford

General Nonfiction

• The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg

History

• William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic by Alan Taylor

Poetry

• The Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham

1997

Biography

• Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

Fiction

• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

General Nonfiction

• Ashes To Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

History

• Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack N. Rakove

Poetry

• Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller

1998

Biography

• Personal History by Katharine Graham

Drama

• How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

Fiction

• American Pastoral by Philip Roth

General Nonfiction

• Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

History

• Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson

Poetry

• Black Zodiac by Charles Wright

1999

Biography

• Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg

Drama

• Wit by Margaret Edson

Fiction

• The Hours by Michael Cunningham

General Nonfiction

• Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

History

• Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

Poetry

• Blizzard of One by Mark Strand