The Pulitzer Prize Plays


Book Description

"With this book, Paul Firestone, lifelong educator and theater aficionado, delivers one of the most comprehensive compendiums of essays on these vital works. Firestone's understanding of each play's substance is rich and impressive. His vast and ambitious examination takes into account many different elements-characters, plots, and symbolism, as well as the lives and psychology of the playwrights, the historical context in which the plays emerged, and their relevance on sociological, political, familial, psychological, and spiritual levels.".




The End of the Myth


Book Description

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history – from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion – fighting wars and opening markets – served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.




Now Playing at the Valencia


Book Description

From Pulitzer Prize-Winning Movie Critic Stephen Hunter Comes A Brilliant, Freewheeling, And Witty Look At The Movies. Evanston, Illinois, was an idyllic 1950s paradise with stately homes, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, two premier movie houses, and one very seedy movie theater -- the Valencia. This was the site of Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's misspent youth. Instead of going to school, picking up girls, or tossing a football, Hunter could be found sitting in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat of the Valencia, sating himself on one B-list movie after another. The Valencia had a sticky floor, smelly bathrooms, ancient popcorn, and a screen set in a hideously tacky papier-mache castle wall. It was also the only place in town to see westerns, sci-fi pictures, cops 'n' robbers flicks, slapstick comedy, and Godzilla. In Now Playing at the Valencia, the author of such bestselling novels as Havana and Pale Horse Coming has compiled his favorite movie reviews written between 1997 and 2003, bringing to the discussion the passionate feelings for cinema he discovered in the '50s, a time when genres were forming, mesmerizing stars played unforgettable characters, and enduring classics were made. While filmmaking has changed tremendously since Hunter first frequented the Valencia, the view from the fifteenth row, and the thrill of down and dirty entertainment, has remained the same.




Sweat


Book Description

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Filled with warm humor and tremendous heart, SWEAT tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets, and laughs while working together on the factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in a heart-wrenching fight to stay afloat.




The Overstory: A Novel


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.




Driving Miss Daisy


Book Description

Racial tensions are delicately explored when a warm friendship evolves between an elderly Jewish woman and her black chauffeur. Winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.




Women Pulitzer Playwrights


Book Description

In the first century of the coveted Pulitzer Prizes, only 11 women have won the prize for drama: Zona Gale (1921), Susan Glaspell (1931), Zoe Akins (1935), Mary Coyle Chase (1945), Ketti Frings (1958), Beth Henley (1981), Marsha Norma (1983), Wendy Wasserstein (1989), Paula Vogel (1998), Margaret Edson (1999), and Suzan-Lori Parks (2002). This book is about them and their landmark plays, beginning with Gale's Miss Lulu Bett, which championed the unmarried woman forced to work in the home of a married relative, and closing with Parks' controversial Topdog/Underdog, which made her the first black woman to win the prize. Drawn from personal interviews with the playwrights and research from archives and unpublished material, this work shows how the stage art of women has reflected life in the American family and traces a strong thread of feminist history in our culture. Overview chapters set the stage for each playwright and play with sketches of the time period, highlighting the major points of women's experiences in culture, society and the family. Other chapters analyze each play in detail and discuss the playwright's life and opinions. The book also includes a quick history of the Pulitzer Prize and a chapter honoring black female playwrights.




Luna Park


Book Description

Drawing from his own, specific experience, Margulies has indeed created what he calls “a window to the world” at large. The bits and pieces and detritus of our culture have been used to construct a powerful drama about a new and devastating age of anxiety in the United States. July 7, 1994 ranks as an important work by a gifted and growing American playwright."—Chicago Tribune This new anthology by Donald Margulies collects his best short plays and monologues written over the past 24 years. Taken as a whole, the work is an extraordinary representation of a particularly American reality of the twentieth century. His language is exquisite and deceptive in its simplicity, wherein the larger questions of our daily existence emerge and are clarified. The volume contains three major one-act plays including July 7, 1994, the hit of the 1995 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; Pitching to the Stars, a darkly comic look at the writers lot in Hollywood; and Luna Park, an elegiac look at the American past and the immigrant experience, based on a short story by Delmore Schwartz. The volume also includes fifteen other short plays and monologues. Donald Margulies is the author of numerous plays, including Dinner with Friends and Collected Stories, both being filmed for television by HBO and PBS. Mr. Margulies lives with his wife and son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University. Also available by Donald Margulies Dinner with Friends PB $11.95 1-55936-194-8 • USA Collected Stories PB $11.95 1-55936-152-2 • USA Sight Unseen and Other Plays PB $16.95 1-55936-103-4 • USA




The Unseen Hand and Other Plays


Book Description




A Confederacy of Dunces


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).