JEWISH RECIPIENTS OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
(46% of recipients)


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Listed below are recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction who were, or are, Jewish (or of partial Jewish descent, as noted).  For lists of Jewish novelists, playwrights, poets, and other Jewish writers, see Jews in Literature.
  • Theodore H. White (1962), The Making of the President 1960
  • Barbara Tuchman (1963), The Guns of August
  • Richard Hofstadter 1 (1964), Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
  • David Brion Davis (1967), The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
  • Ariel Durant (1968), Rousseau And Revolution (The Story Of Civilization: Volume 10, with Will Durant)
  • Norman Mailer (1969), The Armies Of The Night
  • Erik Erikson 2 (1970), Gandhi's Truth
  • Barbara Tuchman (1972), Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
  • Robert Coles 3 (1973), Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
  • Ernest Becker (1974), The Denial of Death
  • Carl Sagan (1978), The Dragons of Eden
  • Douglas Hofstatder (1980), Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
  • Carl Schorske 4 (1981), Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics And Culture
  • Susan Margulies Sheehan (1983), Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
  • Paul Starr (1984), The Social Transformation Of American Medicine
  • Studs Terkel (1985), The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two
  • Joseph Lelyveld (1986), Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
  • J. Anthony Lukas (1986), Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
  • Daniel Yergin (1992), The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
  • David Remnick (1994), Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
  • Jonathan Weiner (1995), The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
  • Tina Rosenberg (1996), The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
  • Richard Kluger (1997), Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
  • Jared Diamond (1998), Guns, Germs, and Steel
  • Herbert Bix (2001), Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
  • Anne Applebaum (2004), Gulag: A History
  • Saul Friedlander (2008), The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
  • David Hoffman (2010), The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
  • Stephen Greenblatt (2012), The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
  • Dan Fagin (2014), Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
  • Elizabeth Kolbert (2015), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
  • Nathan Thrall (2024), A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
NOTES
1. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
2. Son of a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and a German-Jewish step-father, Dr. Theodor Homburger.  Prior to her marriage to Homburger, Erikson's mother was briefly married to a Danish Jew, Valdemar Isidor Salomonson.  Erikson claimed, however, that his biological father was an unknown, non-Jewish Dane.  See Erik Erikson: a detailed evaluation and genogram study, by Monica McGoldrick.
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see The Life of Learning, edited by Douglas Greenberg and Stanley Katz (Oxford University Press, New York, 1994, p. 55).

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