2011 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music

FICTION: "A Visit from the Goon Squad," by Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf) 

Ms. Egan, 48, was cited for fiction for her “inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.”

She radically re-imagined the novel genre by writing a series of interlocking stories. In hardcover, the book was not identified as a novel on the cover, leading some readers to believe that it was a nonfiction study about music.

“At one point I was calling it entangled stories,” Ms. Egan said. “It’s a little mysterious in its genre. In a way, who cares? As long as it feels like a story.”

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Finalists: "The Privileges," by Jonathan Dee (Random House); "The Surrendered," by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead Books).

DRAMA: "Clybourne Park" by Bruce Norris

“Clybourne Park,” a comedy about race relations inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun,” is set in the same house in Chicago in 1959 and 2009.

In the first act, residents of an all-white neighborhood grow anxious as blacks move in; by the second act, the neighborhood has become predominantly black, and it is the arrival of a white couple that stirs tension.

The Pulitzer jury noted that the characters “speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.” Mr. Norris, 50, said in a statement that he was “deeply honored and totally flabbergasted.”

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Finalists: "A Free Man of Color," by John Guare; "Detroit," by Lisa D'Amour.

HISTORY: "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" by Eric Foner (W. W. Norton & Company)

At a moment when attention is focused on the start of the Civil War 150 years ago, Dr. Foner, 68, was cited for “bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story.”

An expert on the politics of the Civil War era, he argues that Lincoln initially reflected many of the prejudiced racial attitudes of his time, but grew morally and politically in the presidency until he came to embrace the Civil War’s “fundamental and astounding” result: emancipation and the recognition of blacks as American citizens.

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Finalists: "Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South," by Stephanie McCurry (Harvard University Press); "Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston," by Michael Rawson (Harvard University Press).

BIOGRAPHY: "Washington: A Life" by Ron Chernow (The Penguin Press)

No American is so revered as George Washington, yet Mr. Chernow, 62, was troubled that “in recent years people had an image of Washington as wooden, bland and boring,” far from the “passionate, complex and sensitive man — dynamic and commanding and charismatic,” whose contemporaries viewed him as an authentic hero, the author said Monday.

 Striving to uncover Washington’s hidden side, Mr. Chernow achieved what the citation called “a sweeping, authoritative portrait of an iconic leader learning to master his private feelings in order to fulfill his public duties.” 

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Finalists: "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century," by Alan Brinkley (Alfred A. Knopf); "Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon," by Michael O'Brien (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

POETRY: "The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" by Kay Ryan (Grove Press)

Ms. Ryan, 65, labored outside poetry’s mainstream for decades before she started gaining recognition for her sharp, aphoristic work, much of which is gathered in her eighth book. “I was trying to offer a review of a fairly long career that was not much remarked on for the first 25 years of it,” said Ms. Ryan, who last year was the 16th poet laureate of the United States. “My things are little, and it’s nice if you pile them up. It’s a bigger sock in the jaw.”

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Finalists: "The Common Man," by Maurice Manning (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); "Break the Glass," by Jean Valentine (Copper Canyon Press).

GENERAL NONFICTION: "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

Dr. Mukherjee, an oncologist and laboratory researcher in cancer at Columbia University, began taking notes years ago when he was working in Boston as a fellow in cancer medicine. “It was a journal, and then slowly it began to grow bigger and bigger,” said Dr. Mukherjee, 40. “Because it got to the essence of the question, which is: ‘Where are we in the history of cancer and how did we get here’?”

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Finalists: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain," by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton & Company); "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History," by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner).

MUSIC: "Madame White Snake" by Zhou Long, premiered on February 26, 2010 by the Boston Opera the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

The Pulitzer committee described Mr. Zhou’s work as “a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West.” Mr. Zhou, 57, was exiled during the Cultural Revolution but enrolled in the first composition class just after the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing reopened in 1977. “I felt the opera is a reflection of all my works combined,” including music for Chinese ensembles and Western orchestras and choruses, Mr. Zhou said. “I’m not following fashions. I don’t reject anything. I look at everything equally.”