PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Pulitzer Prize
35th president of the United States
John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban...
American composer
George Gershwin was one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions...
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger and songwriter who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with...
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
American poet
Robert Frost was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people...
American aviator
Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator, one of the best-known figures in aeronautical history, remembered for the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City to Paris, on...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
American author
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer in the Southern gothic tradition whose novels, about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest, are noted for their dark violence, dense prose,...
American author
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction...
American historian
Henry Adams was a historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a...
American playwright
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on marginalized communities, the working class, and race relations in America. Nottage has said of her work, “In all my plays, I’m trying...
American writer
Alice Walker is an American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly...
British poet
W. H. Auden was an English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. Most of his verse dramas of this period were written in collaboration...
American biologist
E.O. Wilson was an American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of...
American poet
A Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Jericho Brown is known for poems that address themes of identity, racism, violence, queer sexuality, religious...
American musician
Duke Ellington was an American pianist who was the greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time. One of the originators of big-band jazz, Ellington led his band for more than half a century, composed...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of...
American novelist
Margaret Mitchell was an American author of the enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind (1936). The novel earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and it was the source of the classic...
American historian
Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian best known for the “frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United...
American poet and educator
Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century and the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950). Her works deal with the everyday life of urban African Americans,...
American playwright
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright best known for his plays that deal with matters of identity and history, including race and family legacies. In 2024 his play Appropriate won three Tony...
American musician
Kendrick Lamar is an American rapper who has achieved critical and commercial success with such albums as good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) and To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and singles such as “Not Like Us”...
American author
Isabel Wilkerson is known for chronicling the lives of unsung African Americans and exposing deeply embedded systems of social injustice in her reporting for The New York Times and in her celebrated works...
American author
Rita Dove is an American poet and writer who was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States (1993–95). A trained cellist, Dove often incorporates music themes into her poems,...
United States general
John J. Pershing was a U.S. Army general who commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe during World War I. Pershing graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New...
journalist and professor
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a long-form narrative journalist for The New York Times Magazine and a professor at Howard University. Hannah-Jones created The 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine as an...
American writer
Ray Bradbury was an American author best known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards...
American journalist and government official
Samantha Power is an American journalist, human rights scholar, and government official who served on the National Security Council (2008–13) and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2013–17)...
American writer
Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet and professor best known for his autobiographical poems about African American identity, the Vietnam War, and jazz and blues. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection...
American author
Marilynne Robinson is an American author known for her graceful language and studied observations on humankind and religion in works of fiction and nonfiction. Her best-known works include her debut novel,...
American composer and conductor
John Adams is an American composer and conductor whose works are among the most-performed of contemporary classical music. Adams became proficient on the clarinet at an early age (sometimes freelancing...
American poet
Robert Lowell was an American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry. The publication of his collection Life Studies (1959) is regarded as a watershed moment in American literature. It is...
American composer
Aaron Copland was an American composer who achieved a distinctive musical characterization of American themes in an expressive modern style. Copland, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in New...
American novelist
Upton Sinclair was a prolific American novelist and polemicist for socialism, health, temperance, free speech, and worker rights, among other causes. His classic muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) is a...
American musician
John Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz. Coltrane’s first musical influence was his father, a tailor and part-time musician. John...
American author
Jhumpa Lahiri is an English-born American novelist and short-story writer whose works illuminate the immigrant experience, in particular that of East Indians. She won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000...
American actor and playwright
Tracy Letts is an American actor and dramatist who was best known for his award-winning play August: Osage County (2007; film 2013). Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma, the home of Southeastern Oklahoma...
American director and producer
Joshua Logan was an American stage and motion-picture director, producer, and writer. Best known as the stage director who brought to Broadway such classics as Charley’s Aunt (1940), Annie Get Your Gun...
American author
N. Scott Momaday was an American author who often wrote about his Kiowa heritage. For his novel House Made of Dawn (1968), Momaday became the first Native author to win a Pulitzer Prize. His success with...
American humorist and author
Dave Barry is an American humorist and author best known for a popular humor column he wrote for The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. Barry’s column was syndicated to more than 500 newspapers in the United...
American poet
Natalie Diaz is an American poet who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Postcolonial Love Poem (2020). She is also a Native language activist working to revitalize the Mojave language....
American scholar
Stephen Greenblatt is an American scholar who was credited with establishing New Historicism, an approach to literary criticism that mandated the interpretation of literature in terms of the milieu from...
American journalist
David Remnick is one of the leading figures in American media, especially known as the editor of The New Yorker magazine (1998– ). He previously worked as a reporter at The Washington Post. Remnick has...
American composer
Charles Ives was a significant American composer who is known for a number of innovations that anticipated most of the later musical developments of the 20th century. Ives received his earliest musical...
American musician
Hank Williams was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who in the 1950s arguably became country music’s first superstar. An immensely talented songwriter and an impassioned vocalist, he also experienced...
American historian and author
Robert Caro is an American historian and author whose extensive biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses went beyond studies of the men who were their subjects to investigate the practice of political...
American playwright
Arthur Miller was an American playwright, who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters’ inner lives. He is best known for Death of a Salesman (1949). Miller was shaped by the...
American author and illustrator
Art Spiegelman is an American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991)...
American astronomer
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial...