The Pulitzer Prize, awarded annually on the first Monday of May in literature, journalism, theater and music since 1917, is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the United States. The jury of the award, which often chose not the most popular works as winners, was repeatedly harshly criticized for the subjectivity of the awarding process.
Instructions
Step 1
The date of establishment of the award is considered to be August 17, 1903 - the day when the American newspaper magnate of Hungarian-Jewish origin Joseph Pulitzer introduced a clause in his will, which stipulated the conditions for the establishment of the School of Journalism at Columbia University and the creation of a special Pulitzer fund, which should pay cash awards to outstanding personalities in the fields of literature, music, journalism and theater. For these purposes, a businessman who died in October 1911 bequeathed $ 2 million.
Step 2
The prize awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University in New York is $ 10,000. Seven times in the entire history of the existence of the prize (in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1964, 1971 and 1974) it has not been awarded to anyone, since the jury could not single out a single work worthy of the award.
Step 3
In 1942, the organizing committee of the Pulitzer Prize decided to award it in the field of photojournalism. And since 2006, not only works in paper form, but also works from the Internet have been accepted from applicants for the award.
Step 4
Over the years, the prize has been awarded to such famous literary works as the novel "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell, the story "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway and the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. However, most of the award-winning books have never been bestsellers, and many of the award-winning plays have never been staged on Broadway. The opposite situation developed in the journalistic category: major newspapers, such as, for example, The Washington Post and The New York Times, received most of the awards.
Step 5
The first foreign nominee for the award was Russian journalist Artyom Borovik, whose report “Room 19” about the Brain Institute was shown on the American channel CBS. In April 2001, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Anna Politkovskaya, the author of a detailed chronicle of the war in Chechnya. Photojournalist Alexander Zemlyanichenko, who was the host of a report on the Moscow putsch in 1991 and the author of photographs of President Boris Yeltsin dancing at a rock concert, became the winner of the award twice.
