The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University since 1917. The awards are given for Journalism, Letters, Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Fiction, listed here, Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography and History. The Pulitzer in Fiction is presented for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It is left up to the Nominating Juries and The Pulitzer Prize Board to determine exactly what makes a work "distinguished." For a complete list of Pulitzer winners, visit www.pulitzer.org.

▪ 2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

▪ 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet, but overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú – the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents and, above all, ill-starred love.

▪ 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

▪ 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, readers see a perfect, self-sacrificing, loving, close-knit family. Brooks here concentrates on the absent father. Referring to him as simply March, Brooks creates a picture of his struggle with his not-so-perfect life during his tour of duty as a chaplain on the Civil War battlefields of Virginia. What emerges is the complex conflict of a man of principle who must adjust to fit the reality he encounters.

▪ 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson It is the mid-1950s, as the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling previous generations of his family, notably his pacifist father and Civil War abolitionist grandfather, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

▪ 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones When a plantation proprietor and former slave – now possessing slaves of his own – dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

▪ 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents’ desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s when the family immigrated to America from Greece. ▪ 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo The small Maine town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn’t already boarded up. ▪ 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler's Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears and dreams. Chabon has written an epic novel of great depth, humor and wisdom. ▪ 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri ▪ 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham ▪ 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth ▪ 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser ▪ 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford ▪ 1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields ▪ 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx ▪ 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler ▪ 1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley ▪ 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike ▪ 1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos ▪ 1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler ▪ 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison ▪ 1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor ▪ 1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry ▪ 1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie ▪ 1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy ▪ 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker ▪ 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike ▪ 1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole ▪ 1980: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer