Junot Diaz, Robert Hass among Pulitzer winners

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The 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. For a complete listing, go to the Pulitzer website. In the arts categories, awards have gone to:

Fiction: ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Drama: ‘August: Osage County’ by Tracy Letts

History: ‘What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848’ by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press)

Biography: ‘Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father’ by John Matteson (W.W. Norton)

Poetry: ‘Time and Materials’ by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins) and ‘Failure,’ by Philip Schultz (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction: ‘The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945’ by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins

Several of the selections--to Friedlander and Hass, for instance--seem like career recognitions, and they’re well deserved. Others are surprises: Who would’ve thought that the Alcotts could still make such a splash? In particular, it is good to see that Diaz, who has resisted the urge to publish too much (aside from ‘Wao,’ his other major work is a ten-year-old collection of stories), has been honored for his rich, comic-book colored immigrant saga of a Dominican family. Considering that the Pulitzer for fiction, at times, has gone with somewhat ‘safe’ choices (like Richard Russo’s ‘Empire Falls,’ for instance), it is exciting to see Diaz join the prize ranks with other creators of bold, strange tales, among them Jeffrey Eugenides ‘Middlesex’ in 2003 and that unexpected juggernaut, ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy, last year.

Nick Owchar