Jewish Recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction

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Listed below are recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction who were, or are, Jewish (or of partial Jewish descent, as noted). For lists of Jewish novelists, playwrights, poets, and other Jewish writers, see Jews in Literature.

Theodore H. White (1962), The Making of the President 1960
Barbara Tuchman (1963), The Guns of August
Richard Hofstadter¹ (1964), Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
David Brion Davis (1967), The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
Ariel Durant (1968), Rousseau And Revolution (The Story Of Civilization: Volume 10, with Will Durant)
Norman Mailer (1969), The Armies Of The Night
Erik Erikson² (1970), Gandhi's Truth
Barbara Tuchman (1972), Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
Robert Coles³ (1973), Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
Ernest Becker (1974), The Denial of Death
Carl Sagan (1978), The Dragons of Eden
Douglas Hofstatder (1980), Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Carl Schorske⁴ (1981), Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics And Culture
Susan Margulies Sheehan (1983), Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Paul Starr (1984), The Social Transformation Of American Medicine
Studs Terkel (1985), The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two
Joseph Lelyveld (1986), Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
J. Anthony Lukas (1986), Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Daniel Yergin (1992), The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
David Remnick (1994), Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
Jonathan Weiner (1995), The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Tina Rosenberg (1996), The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
Richard Kluger (1997), Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
Jared Diamond (1998), Guns, Germs, and Steel
Herbert Bix (2001), Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Anne Applebaum (2004), Gulag: A History
Saul Friedlander (2008), The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
David Hoffman (2010), The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
Stephen Greenblatt (2012), The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Dan Fagin (2014), Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
Elizabeth Kolbert (2015), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Nathan Thrall (2024), A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

NOTES
1. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
2. Son of a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and a German-Jewish step-father, Dr. Theodor Homburger. Prior to her marriage to Homburger, Erikson's mother was briefly married to a Danish Jew, Valdemar Isidor Salomonson. Erikson claimed, however, that his biological father was an unknown, non-Jewish Dane. See Erik Erikson: a detailed evaluation and genogram study, by Monica McGoldrick.
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see The Life of Learning, edited by Douglas Greenberg and Stanley Katz (Oxford University Press, New York, 1994, p. 55).

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