Genocide, LBJ Books Chosen

The 2003 Pulitzer Prizes in letters were awarded Monday to a study of international genocide, a history of the U.S. Army in North Africa, a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, a fictional Greek American saga and the poetry of a lyrical, Irish-born writer who now teaches in America.

Robert A. Caro won his second Pulitzer Prize in biography, this one for “Master of the Senate,” his third in a planned four-volume work on the life of Johnson.

Critics have hailed “Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson” (Knopf) as an unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works, how Johnson managed to make it work, and how he used his political magic to ascend to the presidency. Known for his immaculate research, Caro is just as concerned with the writing. “There’s almost a view that if it’s well-written it can’t be good history,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “In my view, it’s not good history unless it’s well-written.”

The award for fiction was given to Jeffrey Eugenides, author of “Middlesex” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a mythic transatlantic tale of Greek family life as lived in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and narrated by a delightfully ironic hermaphrodite. The book’s protagonist, Calliope Stephanides, was raised as a girl but found as a teenager that he was genetically a male.

The Detroit-born Eugenides was in Prague, Czech Republic, for a writers festival when he learned of his prize. “A photographer came up to congratulate me. I had no idea what he meant. Then he said the magic words, ‘Pulitzer Prize.’ So I heard it from a 22-year-old Czech photographer,” he told The Times on Monday.

The author, whose debut novel “The Virgin Suicides” was highly acclaimed, said, “I had my hopes. I also had my common sense that it was a long shot. I tried not to think about it.” Eugenides has lived in Berlin for the last four years with his wife and daughter.

“An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43” (Henry Holt) by war correspondent Rick Atkinson, won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Atkinson received the news in Iraq, where he is reporting alongside the 101st Airborne for the Washington Post. “This is so fabulous. I’m hot and tired and filthy and completely thrilled,” he told Associated Press on Monday.

Samantha Power, who heads the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has won the prize for general nonfiction. Her book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” (Basic Books) is a social history that examines America’s failure to intervene in mass killings through history.

In May, Power won a National Magazine Award for an Atlantic Monthly article on the genocide in Rwanda. “Maybe if U.S. officials fear they will be held accountable in print for their inaction,” she said at the time, “they will be less likely to avert their gazes from the next genocide.”

The prize for poetry was won by postmodernist writer Paul Muldoon, 51, who moved to the United States from Ireland in 1987, and who directs the creative writing program at Princeton. His book, “Moy Sand and Gravel” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), won rave reviews internationally.

“The terrible thing about writing poetry is that most people ... don’t get better at it; if anything, they get worse,” Muldoon told AP on Monday. “So the fact that someone thinks it’s semi-good and worth reading after 30 years is important.”

Muldoon’s selection was an especially popular choice in Ireland, where John Banville, a novelist, critic and former literary editor of the Irish Times, called Muldoon “one of the finest poets of his generation -- not just Irish poets, but poets, period.”

Caro’s first Pulitzer Prize was for “The Power Broker,” a study of the life of builder Robert Moses.

For his intense study of Johnson, Caro and his wife moved from their native New York home -- first to the Hill Country of Texas and then to Washington, D.C., because Caro said he wanted to absorb the pulses and passions of his subject’s life in the most immediate way possible -- by being there.