LETTS, DÍAZ, WASHINGTON POST WIN PULITZERS

The Washington Post dominated its rivals in the journalism categories of the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes, announced yesterday, picking up six awards ranging from public service to commentary. No award for editorial writing was given this year, but the Pulitzer board did recognize Bob Dylan with a special citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

In the arts, Tracy Letts won the coveted drama award for his family saga “August: Osage County,” which opened to great acclaim on Broadway in December. “Packed with unforgettable characters and dozens of quotable lines, it is as harrowing a new work as Broadway has offered in years and the funniest in even longer,” Eric Grode wrote in the Sun, calling the play “savagely brilliant.”

Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz was awarded the fiction prize for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” an acclaimed first novel 11 years in the making. Reviewing the book for the Sun, Benjamin Lytal praised Mr. Díaz as an “excellent writer, and a particular master of voice.” The novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, beat out Denis Johnson’s acclaimed “Tree of Smoke” and the less noted “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” by Lore Segal.

Two prizes for poetry were given, for “Time and Materials” by Robert Hass, and “Failure” by Philip Schultz.

The Pulitzer for history was awarded to Daniel Walker Howe, for “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848,” his panoramic history of antebellum America.

The prize for biography went to John Matteson for “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” and the award for general nonfiction to Saul Friedlander for “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.”

The Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney was awarded the Pulitzer for criticism, “for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts.” Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post was also a finalist, as was Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“The Little Match Girl Passion,” a libretto by David Lang based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, won the prize for music.

On the journalism side of the ledger, the Post cleaned up. Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and photographer Michel du Cille were awarded the prize for public service, for their work “exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital.” The newspaper won also in breaking news, for its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre last April; in national reporting, for a series on Vice President Cheney, and in international reporting, for work on private security firms in Iraq. The Post picked up additional prizes in feature writing, for a much-discussed story by Gene Weingarten about the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell performing before mostly oblivious passengers in a Washington, D.C., subway station, and in commentary, for Steven Pearlstein’s writing on the economy.

In investigative reporting, the board celebrated both the Chicago Tribune, for its study of government regulation of toys, car seats, and cribs, and the New York Times, for stories on the dangers of Chinese imports.

The Pultizer Prizes, which include a cash award of $10,000, are administered by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and awarded annually by a board of journalists and academics that changes each year.

For 2008, the board was co-chaired by Joann Byrd, the former editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial page, and Mike Pride, the editor of the Concord Monitor. Other members were the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger; a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Danielle Allen; the editor of the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Jim Amoss; the executive editor of Bloomberg News, Amanda Bennett; the executive editor for the Associated Press, Kathleen Carroll; a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman; the editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot; the chairman of the Washington Post Company, Donald Graham; the executive editor of the Miami Herald, Anders Gyllenhaal; the director of the Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California, Jay Harris; a professor of history at Stanford University, David Kennedy; the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, Nicholas Lemann; the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Ann Marie Lipinski; the editor of the Denver Post, Gregory Moore; the editor of the Austin American-Statesman, Richard Oppel; the editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Paul Tash, and an associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, Sig Gissler.