2012 Pulitzer Prize

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes in Letters and Drama were announced at Columbia University in April 2012. For the first time since 1977 the board gave no Fiction prize, although three finalists were named: Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace's posthumous The Pale King. Quiara Alegría Hudes won Drama for Water by the Spoonful. The History prize went to the late Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which the board moved from Biography, and John Lewis Gaddis won Biography for George F. Kennan: An American Life. Tracy K. Smith took Poetry for Life on Mars, and Stephen Greenblatt received the General Nonfiction prize for The Swerve. Thirteen finalists were named across the six categories.