Get to Know 5 Pulitzer Prize-Profitable Critics

Positive, it’s not precisely a bookish award, however the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism is earned by good writing. Whereas not all previous recipients have had their work collected in books, work by most may be discovered on-line by their respective newspaper’s or journal’s web site, and even on the Pulitzer web site.

Right here’s a have a look at 5 Pulitzer-winning critics. For extra collections of essays and criticism, take a look at this text from Julia Rittenberg.

Robin Givhan

At the moment in her second stint as vogue editor for The Washington Submit, Robin Givhan received the Pulitzer in 2006. Peruse her work and also you received’t discover simply runway protection. Givhan as a substitute examines singers, film stars and even moviegoers; her piece “Wookiee at me! Garments make the parable,” coping with Star Wars followers who gown up as their favourite characters on the newest film’s opening, is a spotlight. (“Listed below are individuals with a remarkably excessive threshold for public embarrassment.”) Her sharp feedback about politicians (Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney) have prompted the most important stir. Her first e book is The Battle of Versailles: The Evening American Vogue Stumbled Into the Highlight and Made Historical past.

Hilton Als

A formidable presence in New York Metropolis journalism for 30 years now, Hilton Als has been a New Yorker workers author since 1994 and theater critic since 2002. Knowledgeable by second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights motion, Als displays this melding, and generally clashing, of concepts in his writing, typically all the way down to the shape itself; his second e book, White Ladies, was praised for its free mix of truth and fiction. Als received a Pulitzer in 2017 for his theater criticism. It solely takes studying one assessment to know you’re within the palms of a critic steeped in his topic’s historical past; in reviewing Expensive Evan Hansen, he digs up the comparatively obscure Gershwin-Weill-Hart musical Woman within the Darkish to chart the historical past of psychoanalysis’s remedy on stage. Just lately, he was featured documentary Toni Morrison: The Items I Am.

Emily Nussbaum

“It regarded like a great way to kill time,” Emily Nussbaum writes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a random episode of which she settled in for one late-‘90s night time. One episode was all it took for Nussbaum to know she had discovered her area of interest. She left her doctoral program in literature behind and started writing obsessively about tv. Since 2011, she has been the tv critic for The New Yorker and received a Pulitzer in 2016. I Prefer to Watch: Arguing My Means By the TV Revolution, launched in the present day, is her first e book, gathering a lot of her recaps, essays, profiles and commentaries, together with chunk of those that earned her the Prize. Respect is paid to dramatic milestones like The Sopranos, however it’s apparent Nussbaum’s coronary heart lies with comedies. In a single 2008 piece, she proclaims 30 Rock the perfect present on community tv. Within the introductory observe to a different essay, she heaps comparable reward on Jane the Virgin. There’s a frightening quantity of tv on the market. Nussbaum’s writing assures you that critically viewing any program is worth it and significant.

Roger Ebert

All people’s favourite movie critic, or at the very least the primary whose opinions cinephiles familiarize themselves with, the Chicago Solar-Occasions’s Roger Ebert received a Pulitzer in 1975, changing into the primary movie critic to take action. He earned the award for evaluations of titles like Chinatown (“A 1940s private-eye film that doesn’t rely upon nostalgia or camp for its impact”), The Texas Chainsaw Bloodbath (“I can’t think about why anybody would wish to make a film like this, and but it’s well-made, well-acted and all too efficient.”), and The Godfather Half II (“The beautiful textual content of ‘The Godfather’ is changed in ‘Half II’ with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.”) The majority of his revealed writing may be discovered on the web site that bears his identify and carries on, by evaluations by Matt Zoller Seitz, Monica Castillo, Odie Henderson, and extra, six years after his demise.

Inga Saffron

A 3-time Pulitzer finalist who lastly took house the award in 2014, Inga Saffron has been The Philadelphia Inquirer’s structure critic for 20 years. She focuses on “tasks of all dimensions and shapes, however particularly those who type the backdrop of our each day lives,” as her creator web page from the newspaper places it. You wouldn’t anticipate a column a couple of proposal for a brand new on line casino to be attention-grabbing till you learn Saffron’s “Finest-laid plans for metropolis casinos.” What’s ostensibly an account of the most recent gaming corridor listening to as a substitute turns into a deft illustration of how enthusiasm for a newfound freedom (to gamble, on this case) shortly fades into the background of life. (“Most individuals now deal with casinos like supermarkets.”) The opposite 4 critics on this listing make motion pictures, tv, vogue and/or theater imply every part. Saffron does the identical for buildings. She has written one e book, Caviar: The Unusual Historical past and Unsure Way forward for the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy.

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