On Monday, five Harvard alumni and faculty members won Pulitzer Prizes for work that encompasses American history, a sports investigation, and the story of a Texas city as told through its architecture.
Jill Lepore, the Kemper professor of American history and a professor of law, was honored for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, a sweeping exploration of the amendment process. As she writes in the book, it is also “a deep historical critique of originalism,” the legal theory that now dominates the U.S. Supreme Court—a body whose exclusive control over constitutional interpretation she also disputes. Examining why amending the Constitution has become a near-impossible task, Lepore warns that without the ability to alter and renew the nation’s founding document, the risk of political violence rises, and so does the risk of change by presidential or judicial fiat.
Author Amanda Vaill ’70 received the prize in biography for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. The book follows Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, aristocratic sisters from the colonial Hudson Valley, who became entangled in the American Revolution. Angelica married a war profiteer (whom her father once called a “noxious beetle”) and socialized with luminaries including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Elizabeth married then-penniless Alexander Hamilton, later a founder of the new nation and its first treasury secretary. Through historical narrative and family drama, the book muses on the role of women in this extraordinary historical moment. Vaill studied English literature at Radcliffe College.
The prize winner in drama, playwright Bess Wohl ’96, was honored for work examining a different kind of American revolution. Mixing sharp comedy and heartfelt sincerity, Wohl’s play, Liberation, looks back at the second-wave feminism of the 1970s through the lens of a women’s liberation group in Ohio. The plot was inspired by Wohl’s own mother, an activist and staffer at Ms. magazine. During research for the play, Wohl interviewed numerous women who were part of the movement. (On Tuesday, Liberation was nominated for five Tony Awards as well, including best play.)
Sports journalist Pablo Torre ’07 and the entire staff of his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, won the Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting for their investigation into an alleged violation of the NBA salary cap by the Los Angeles Clippers. Torre and his team documented how the team paid star player Kawhi Leonard millions more than league rules allowed by funneling money through an endorsement deal with a California-based environmental startup company. After Torre’s series aired, the NBA opened an official investigation, which is ongoing.
Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster, who since 2023 has been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), was honored for a series of impassioned and biting columns scrutinizing some of Dallas’s most significant structures and sites to both tell the history of the city and argue for his vision of its future. Lamster was a Loeb fellow at the GSD in 2017.
