Epic works win Pulitzer Prizes

NEW YORK -- "Master of the Senate," Robert Caro's epic third volume of his Lyndon Johnson series, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography Monday.\nThe fiction prize went to Jeffrey Eugenides for "Middlesex," a story of sexual and ethnic identity.\nBig books prevailed in the arts. Caro's work runs 1,100 pages, Eugenides' more than 500 pages and the winner for history, Rick Atkinson's "An Army at Dawn," is just over 700 pages.\nReaching Atkinson, whose book is the first of a planned World War II trilogy, proved especially challenging. He is currently embedded in Iraq with the 101st Airborne.\n"This is so fabulous. I'm hot and tired and filthy and completely thrilled," said Atkinson, who won a Pulitzer for national reporting, in 1982, when he was at The Kansas City Times. He is currently on assignment for The Washington Post.\nIn the drama category, voters bypassed three-time Pulitzer winner Edward Albee, a finalist for "The Goat," and chose the little-known "Anna in the Tropics," by Nilo Cruz.\nIn the play, a cigar factory owner's daughter has an affair with a lector, a man hired to read to the workers while they toil. One of the books he reads is Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," and the novel soon mirrors the action on stage.\nCruz found out that he had won the prize while at the train station in New Haven, Conn., where he was teaching a class in playwrighting at Yale University.\n"I was in shock," he said. "Immediately, I broke down crying. I was on this train taking me to Paradise. My play has to do with 'Anna Karenina' (in which the heroine commits suicide by jumping in front of a train), so it was so appropriate."\nThe general nonfiction prize went to "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," by Samantha Power, who has already won the National Book Critics Circle award. The winner for poetry was "Moy Sand and Gravel" by Paul Muldoon. And the prize for music went to "On the Transmigration of Souls," by John Adams, which the New York Philharmonic premiered.\nAdams' work is a tribute to victims, survivors and heroes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. \nCaro, too, has known both success and controversy. He won the Pulitzer in 1975 for "The Power Broker," an often devastating chronicle of the mighty municipal builder Robert Moses. He has spent the past quarter century investigating Johnson, to great acclaim, strong sales and considerable abuse.\nThe first two books, "The Path to Power" and "Means of Ascent," each won a National Book Critics Circle award, but also led some commentators and Johnson aides to accuse Caro of hating his subject and distorting his life.\nCaro has insisted from the beginning that he considered Johnson a creature of both ambition and benevolence and "Master of the Senate" emphasized his legislative genius in getting Congress, in 1957, to pass the first civil rights bill of the 20th century.\n"You know, there's been a lot of struggle in doing these books, a lot of attacks on me from the Johnson loyalists," Caro said Monday. "But I think I always held onto what I learned in school, that if a book was done truly enough, it would endure."\nThe fiction prize for "Middlesex" almost surely marks a milestone in Pulitzer history: the first book so honored to be narrated by a hermaphrodite, loosely defined as someone with both male and female sexual organs.\nMuldoon, a native of Northern Ireland, has been writing poetry since he was 17. Currently director of Princeton University's creative writing program, Muldoon has experimented with many forms of poetry, from haiku to sestina.