Sat 29 Sep 2007
How many Ephs have won a Pulitzer Prize? This seems like the sort of empirical question we ought to be able to answer. Indeed, perhaps it is time for a Wikipedia page on the topic. I see:
John Toland ‘36
Professor James McGregor Burns ‘39
Bernard Bailyn ‘45
Hedrick Smith ‘55
John Kifner ‘63 (who wins (?) via his contribution to a collection of articles for the New York Times. I think that all the reporters in such a collection can and do describe themselves as Pulitzer-winners. Is that the convention? Or do you need to be cited by name to claim that honor?)
Edward Larson ‘74
Stacy Schiff ‘82
Sonia Nazario ‘82
Former Professor Louise Gluck (not sure if a non-alum belongs in this list but she won the Pulitzer while she was at Williams).
Are there any others? Leaving aside Gluck, all of these Ephs have won Bicentennial Medals except for Smith and Larson. Surely they should be near the top of the list as the committee members consider nominations for next year.
UPDATE: Thanks for the comment below on Greg Jaffe ‘91. Since he is the author of several of the articles for which the Wall Street Journal won, he is, indeed, a Pulitzer Prize winner. (Note the confusion here on that topic.) In the category of Williams alum Pulitzer winners who have not won Bicentennial Medals, we have 3 men and 0 women. Nothing to see there! Please, just move along.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am
These folks are intertwingled. Ed Larson and I took a Leadership course taught by James MacGregor Burns ‘39 our Junior year. Ed was not the most confident person in the world at the time, and I remember giving him pep talks in the Mission Park dining hall that he could do the paper (20-30 pages). He was writing about his local congressman, and felt that maybe the subject wasn’t grand enough (I wrote my paper on JFK’s leadership in civil rights). Well, Ed went on to get an A+ on the paper and that him ultimately got him into writing.
[I got an A- on my paper, and Burns characterized it as the best defense of JFK's leadership in a specific area that he had read. I, like Ed, haul out that memory when I need an internal pep talk because I'm feeling writing is too difficult.]
Here’s what Ed said about the experience in his Booknotes interview:
LAMB: What’s it mean to get a Pulitzer Prize?
Prof. LARSON: Well, in my profession it’s–it’s–it’s the greatest there is. It’s the–it–well, it’s a tribute to writing, and I love to write. I love the–I love crafting words. I like to do research. I like history. When I was–when I was going to college–this sort of captures it–I had always thought I could write. I came from rural Ohio and–where we didn’t get much particular training, and I learned to–I learned to love literature by reading, not by writing. And I loved to read, oh, various novelists, but I also liked Dickens and I liked Hawthorne and–but I also liked Virgil and some of the classics and–and Shakespeare and I loved to write. And I–and I thought I could do it.
And then I got to college, and my freshman comp teachers were very, very discouraging, but I–but I–but I–I liked it. And what I always wanted to do is be a history teacher. And I had sort of given up on my college and I was going to leave, but I had to get fresh–senior standing to –junior standing to transfer into University of Michigan. And I thought, `Well, for my last–in the last qua–last semester here, I’ll take James McGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize winner, o–I’ve heard a wonderful human being.’ And I knew it was just a course where you’d write one big paper. This had to be a paper on your congressmen.
And I just poured my heart out in writing that paper. And I–I was going to be leaving the college anyway, and here he was–I knew he could write because he had a Pulitzer Prize–he had two, actually, but I–that’s why I knew he could write. And I, of course, loved his books on Roosevelt. And I’d–I’d left the college after I turned it in and I had–because I had to be out to Michigan–University of Michigan to start. And he sent the paper back to me, and it was an A+. And with–with wonderful comments in it. And that’s when I had confidence I could write. So winning the Pulitzer Prize was special for me because it had that–that history, that–that–that–that connection with Jim Burns.
September 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
WSJ reporter Greg Jaffe ‘91 gets credit for this one, I think
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2000/national-reporting/works/military_exploits.html
September 30th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Grace Rubenstein, ‘01 shared a pulitzer for work she did reporting with the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence Ma. Check this link http://www.williams.edu/go/careers/profile_rubenstein.php
or google grace rubenstein pulitzer for more info.
I don’t think she’s got a Bicentennial medal in her pocket…
September 30th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Oh no. Now he’s going to start trashing Grace Rubenstein’s “empirical level of achievement” again…
October 1st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Eric Schmitt ‘82 was part of NYT staff Public Service Pulitzer for work in wake of 9-11 and i think he may have shared at least one other but i don’t have time to play with it right now.
and while we’re at it, i won the prize for investigative reporting in 2000 for reporting on vote fraud in Miami’s mayoral election. Pulitzer rules always name “staff” for the Public Service category and also use “staff” if there are more than three named authors. There are sometimes debates in the world of journalism over who can be called Pulitzer winner. the easy answer if if you have a byline on the stories entered for the prize.
the miami herald staff won the public service pulitzer in 1994 for hurricane andrew. prizes like that are truly “staff,” just as with Grand Forks and New Orleans Times Picayune after natural disasters so big that in fact the whole staff is covering the story. as the Florida Keys reporter, i was stationed just south of andrew’s ground zero and reported it extensively. but i would never say i won a pulitzer in that case because i think that’s misleading. i have heard complaints by some people about folks who describe themselves as pulitzer winners on the basis of that kind of vast staff prize.