Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07, has won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, an account of the nineteenth-century Cambridge-born author, journalist, critic, and pioneering advocate of women’s rights who died with her Italian revolutionary husband and infant son in a shipwreck on her return from Europe. (For more information on Marshall, read “The Allure of the Bad Boy,” from our May-June 2005 issue, as well as “Margaret Fuller: Saying in the 19th Century What Still Needs to Be Said” from Radcliffe Magazine. Also listen to a podcast featuring a reading from her book here.)
Several alumni and faculty are among the finalists for this year’s prizes:
- Bernbaum professor of literature Leo Damrosch, for biography, for Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, a seminal work that illuminates the famous yet enigmatic satirist who was also a crucial figure in eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish politics.
- Rebecca Davis O’Brien ’06 for local reporting, for her exposure of how heroin has permeated the suburbs of northern New Jersey; she profiled addicts and families and mapped the drug pipeline from South America to their community.
- John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72, D. Mus. ’12, for music, for The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a monumental oratorio about the final period of Christ’s life that is marked by impassioned music and an imaginative variety of evocative sounds. (For more on Adams see “Music, Taken Personally,” “Nixon in China Creators Re-create” and coverage of his honorary degree from Commencement 2012.)
