Pulitzer Prize: general nonfiction

In his will, publisher Joseph Pulitzer provided funding to create the Pulitzer Prize. The first prize for general nonfiction was awarded in 1962. The category covers books by American authors that are not eligible in any other nonfiction category, such as history or biography. Occasionally, there have been multiple recipients per year.

2024: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall

2023: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

2022: Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott

2021: Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino

2020: The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, by Anne Boyer

2020: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin 

2019: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold

2018: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr.

2017: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond

2016: Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick

2015: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert

2014: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, by Dan Fagin

2013: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King

2012: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

2011: The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

2010: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, by David E. Hoffman

2009: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon

2008: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, by Saul Friedlander

2007: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

2006: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Caroline Elkins

2005: Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll

2004: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum

2003: "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power

2002: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter

2001: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix

2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, by John W. Dower

1999: Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee

1998: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond

1997: Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger

1996: The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, by Tina Rosenberg

1995: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution In Our Time, by Jonathan Weiner

1994: Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire, by David Remnick

1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills

1992: The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin

1991: The Ants, by Bert Holldobler

1990: And Their Children After Them, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson

1989: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan

1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes

1987: Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, by David K. Shipler

1986 (two awards): Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the LIves of Three American Families, by  J. Anthony Lucas

1986 (two awards): Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, by Joseph Lelyveld

1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two, by Studs Terkel

1984: The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by Paul Starr

1983: Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, by Susan Sheehan

1982: The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder

1981: Fin De Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske

1980: Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter

1979: On Human Nature, by Edward O. Wilson

1978: The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan

1977: Beautiful Swimmers, by William W. Warner

1976: Why Survive? Being Old In America, by Robert N. Butler

1975: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

1974: The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker

1973 (two awards): Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III, by Robert Coles

1973 (two awards): Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, by Frances FitzGerald

1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945, by Frances FitzGerald

1971: The Rising Sun, by John Toland

1970: Gandhi’s Truth, by Erik H. Erikson

1969: So Human An Animal, by Rene Jules

1968: The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution, by Will and Ariel Durant

1967: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, by David Brion Davis

1966: Wandering Through Winter, by Edwin Way Teale

1965: O Strange New World, by Howard Mumford Jones

1964: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter

1963: The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman

1962: The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White