Pulitzer Prize Bucket List

Hofstadter on self-reference in logic, art and music, and where minds come from; the Pulitzer nobody finishes.

Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.

Tracy Kidder inside Data General building a computer in 1979; the first great tech book.

Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.

Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer history of the Soviet camps from the archives.

The one we are causing, species by species; Kolbert's Pulitzer.

Why Eurasia conquered the rest: geography, crops and animals rather than people; Diamond's Pulitzer.

A biography of cancer from ancient Egypt to gene therapy; Mukherjee's Pulitzer.

The first month of the First World War day by day; Tuchman's Pulitzer that Kennedy read during the missile crisis.

A boy walks out of a bombed museum with a Dutch painting; 800 pages and a Pulitzer.

Two retired Texas Rangers drive cattle to Montana; the western as great American novel.

A dying Iowa preacher writes to his seven-year-old son; the quietest Pulitzer.

David Copperfield retold in opioid Appalachia; Kingsolver's Pulitzer.

Nine strangers and the trees that change their lives; Powers' Pulitzer.

Celie's letters to God and to her sister in 1930s Georgia; Alice Walker's Pulitzer.

A father and son push a shopping cart through a burned America; the ending is why people read it.

Scarlett O Hara from Tara to the burning of Atlanta; a thousand pages and the most popular American novel.

Ignatius J. Reilly, hot-dog vendor and medievalist, against New Orleans; published eleven years after the author's suicide.

Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.

Swede Levov, the perfect Newark athlete, and the daughter who bombs a post office; Roth's Pulitzer.