Edward Jones continued his stellar year by winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Known World (HC/Amistad). That makes it two out of three for Jones, who also won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was nominated for the National Book Award. The Known World is Jones's first book of fiction since 1994, when he was also nominated for a National Book Award for Lost in the City, a collection of his short stories.

Winners or candidates for other prizes also did well in the Pulitzers. NBCC winner William Taubman won for biography with Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton), while Anne Applebaum's Gulag (Doubleday), shortlisted for the NBA, won for general nonfiction. Franz Wright won for Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf) in poetry. In history, A Nation Under Our Feet by Steven Hahn (Harvard Univ. Press/ Belknap) took the prize.