Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 1999: Complete list of winners

The 1999 Pulitzer Prizes delivered a remarkably diverse slate of winners that showcased American letters at their finest. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, an audacious reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, claimed fiction honors in what many consider one of the strongest years in the prize’s modern history. Meanwhile, Margaret Edson’s Wit—a spare, intellectually rigorous play about a dying scholar confronting her own mortality—won the drama category and would go on to become a cultural phenomenon, eventually earning a celebrated HBO adaptation. These victories signaled a moment when the Pulitzer committee was rewarding formally inventive, emotionally complex work across multiple categories.

The nonfiction winners that year reflected equally ambitious ambitions. John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a sweeping geological history that had taken decades to research and write, secured the General Nonfiction prize, while A. Scott Berg’s meticulously researched biography of Charles Lindbergh claimed the biography category. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s monumental Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 earned the history prize, a 1,386-page work that redefined how we understand the city’s past. In poetry, Mark Strand’s Blizzard of One continued his legacy as one of America’s most elegant and philosophical contemporary poets.

Here are the complete winners of the 1999 Pulitzer Prizes:

Biography

Drama

  • Cover of Wit Wit by Margaret Edson

Fiction

General Nonfiction

History

Poetry