Novelist Philip Roth, who has received virtually every major American literary award over the course of his long career, has added to his awards portfolio by winning his first Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his 22nd novel, American Pastoral, published by Houghton Mifflin.
He was joined by New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, winner of the criticism award. The history prize was awarded to Edward J. Larson's Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Basic Books); the biography prize went to Katherine Graham's Personal History (Knopf); the p try award went to Charles Wright's Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus &Giroux); and the general nonfiction prize was awarded to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton).