Arts Winners Express Joy and Surprise

The 2001 Pulitzer Prizes in the letters, drama and music categories had one winner joking about an unlikely trifecta.

Composer John Corigliano, who Monday was named as the Pulitzer music winner for his Symphony No. 2 for String Orchestra, last year took home an Oscar for best original score for the feature film “The Red Violin.”

Reached by phone Monday at his home in Manhattan, Corigliano, 63, joked that for next year, he has his eye on the Nobel Prize. “They don’t give it for music yet; I’ll just have to move into another field,” he said.

Corigliano’s winning work was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Nov. 30 at Symphony Hall in Boston. He described his composition as a “very serious work about farewell,” based on a previous work written for the Cleveland Quartet as the group was preparing to disband.

“I wouldn’t say I was indifferent to getting an Oscar, but [the Pulitzer] is a totally different thing,” Corigliano said. “I wandered into film composing, but I’ve spent my entire life in the concert hall. The Pulitzer is the concert hall award.”

In the drama category, Massachusetts playwright David Auburn, 31, won the prize for “Proof,” which opened off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club last May and moved to Broadway in October.

The play focuses on Catherine, the daughter of a brilliant but unstable mathematician at the University of Chicago. Catherine has given up her own mathematics career to care for her ailing father. She is now faced with a sister who wants to save her from madness and a shy suitor who is going through her father’s papers.

Speaking by phone from his home in Williamstown, Mass., Auburn was asked what the Pulitzer win meant to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m going to find out.”

“Proof” has not been seen outside of its initial run in New York. Auburn said a commercial tour is under consideration that he hopes will duplicate the New York staging by Daniel Sullivan--who also directed last year’s Pulitzer drama winner, “Dinner With Friends.”

Five Pulitzers were awarded under the heading of letters--for fiction, general nonfiction, biography, history and poetry.

The fiction prize was awarded to Berkeley writer Michael Chabon, 37, for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a fanciful tale about two cousins who become collaborators in the comic book business in New York during the 1930s and ‘40s. Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, 36, alerted her husband to the news by shrieking when a reporter called their home for comment.

“I started screaming at the top of my lungs, which actually scared him half to death because I am about eight months pregnant,” Waldman said. “He came running into the house, sure that something horrible had happened. I was screaming hysterically and jumping up and down, and I leaped into his arms--all 155 pounds of me.”

Chabon, a runner-up in the 2000 National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards, said: “I’d sort of given up expecting anything like this. I was a finalist for two other prizes this year and did not get them. I’m very much caught by surprise and really excited and delighted. At least from the professional point of view, this has been a very good year for me.”

The award for a distinguished biography or autobiography by an American author went to “W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963” by David Levering Lewis.

“It’s wonderful that a very significant life that has somewhat faded from the American canon has come roaring back,” said the exultant Lewis, a 64-year-old Rutgers University history professor. The award for a distinguished book of nonfiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category went to Herbert P. Bix for “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.” Another book on Japan, “Embracing Defeat” by historian John W. Dower, won a Pulitzer last year.

“I think my award, coming after John Dower’s last year, underscores the importance of Japan and Japan-U.S. relations for our century,” Bix said Monday. Joseph J. Ellis’ “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation” won for a distinguished book on the history of the United States.

Stephen Dunn received the award for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author for “Different Hours.”

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Times theater writer Don Shirley contributed to this story.