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The year's Pulitzer Prize in Biography

 


Here is a full list of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Here are the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners : NPR

One of them seems extraordinary enough to be worthy of discussion in the august forum you are now perusing: the Pulitzer for biography. it went this year to G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

A distinguished historian, Beverly Gage, wrote the work. Viking published it. I've never read a word of it, and don't plan to. I have to say the prize committee's praise of it sounds quite off-putting to me. 

Gage is praised for "a deeply researched and nuanced look at one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history that depicts the longtime FBI director in all his complexity, with monumental achievements and crippling flaws." 

It sounds to me like the prize committee has suffered from a crippling attack of both-sidesism. I would imagine his life did have lots of "complexity," heck in the drag-demonizing 2020s his fashion choices along might be thought complex. But I think the world could have done without his "monumental achievements" quite well. 

Perhaps the best thing he did was elevate Mark Felt to a post whence Felt [pictured above] could become "Deep Throat" and effectively bring an end to the Nixon administration. But I suspect that is not what Gage or the prize bestowers mean by the "monumental achievements" stuff. 

Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep in May 1972. So we might well say that any credit he may have earned by his elevation of Felt was credit that Hoover earned only over his own dead body. 


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