PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Pulitzer Prize
35th president of the United States
John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States (1961â63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban...
American composer
George Gershwin was one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions...
American singer-songwriter
Bob Dylan is an American singer and songwriter who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and rollâtheretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendoâwith the...
American dramatist
Eugene OâNeill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Dayâs Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. A masterful stylist and mythmaker, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness writing...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
American poet
Robert Frost was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people...
Dominican-born American writer
Junot DĂaz is a Dominican-born American author whose work centers on the experience of immigrants in their home countries and in the United States. Known for his swaggering prose, he incorporates pop culture...
American novelist
John Steinbeck was an American novelist best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers....
American aviator
Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator, one of the best-known figures in aeronautical history, remembered for the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City to Paris, on...
American author
Larry McMurtry was an award-winning American writer noted for his novels set on the frontier, in contemporary small towns, and in increasingly urbanized and industrial areas of Texas. He was awarded a...
American writer and illustrator
Dr. Seuss was an American writer and illustrator of immensely popular childrenâs books noted for their nonsense words, playful rhymes, and unusual creatures. After graduating from Dartmouth College (B.A.,...
American author
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer in the Southern gothic tradition whose novels, about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest, are noted for their dark violence, dense prose,...
American author
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist whose best-known works, such as the poems âDaddyâ and âLady Lazarusâ and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction...
author of Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell was the American author and journalist who wrote Gone With the Wind, a novel that achieved enormous popularity after its publication in 1936. It earned her a National Book Award and a...
Journalist who made sure that the women abused by Jeffrey Epstein were heard
Julie K. Brown is an award-winning investigative journalist for the Miami Herald who was described in a 2026 profile as âthe woman who brought down Jeffrey Epstein.â But before she became one of the most...
American musician
Kendrick Lamar is an American rapper who achieved critical and commercial success with such albums as good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012) and To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and singles such as âNot Like Usâ (2024)....
American historian
Henry Adams was a historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the product of Bostonâs Brahmin class, a...
American musician
John Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer whose innovative improvisational styles made him an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz. Coltraneâs first musical influence was his...
American playwright
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on marginalized communities, the working class, and race relations in America. Nottage has said of her work, âIn all my plays, Iâm trying...
American writer
Alice Walker is an American writer whose novels, short stories, and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture. Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly...
British poet
W. H. Auden was an English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. Most of his verse dramas of this period were written in collaboration...
American biologist
E.O. Wilson was an American biologist recognized as the worldâs leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of...
American writer
Ray Bradbury was an American author best known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards...
American author
Viet Thanh Nguyen is an American writer known for his novel The Sympathizer (2015), which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted into a television miniseries in 2024. Nguyenâs work frequently...
American poet
A Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation âgenius grant,â Jericho Brown is known for poems that address themes of identity, racism, violence, queer sexuality, religious...
American musician
Duke Ellington was an American pianist who was the greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time. One of the originators of big-band jazz, Ellington led his band for more than half a century, composed...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of...
American historian
Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian best known for the âfrontier thesis.â The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United...
American poet and educator
Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century and the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950). Her works deal with the everyday life of urban African Americans,...
American author
Elizabeth Strout is an American author known for her empathetic novels that are typically set in small towns and feature flawed but likable characters dealing with personal issues. Many of the works are...
American playwright
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright best known for his plays that deal with matters of identity and history, including race and family legacies. In 2024 his play Appropriate won three Tony...
American author
Isabel Wilkerson is known for chronicling the lives of unsung African Americans and exposing deeply embedded systems of social injustice in her reporting for The New York Times and in her celebrated works...
American author
Rita Dove is an American poet and writer who was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States (1993â95). A trained cellist, Dove often incorporates music themes into her poems,...
American author
Annie Proulx is an American writer whose darkly comic yet sad fiction is peopled with quirky, memorable individuals and unconventional families. Her novels and short stories, which are often about disintegrating...
American military officer
John J. Pershing was a U.S. Army general who commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe during World War I. Pershing graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New...
journalist and professor
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a long-form narrative journalist for The New York Times Magazine and a professor at Howard University. Hannah-Jones created The 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine as an...
American journalist and government official
Samantha Power is an American journalist, human rights scholar, and government official who served on the National Security Council (2008â13) and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2013â17)...
American writer
Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet and professor best known for his autobiographical poems about African American identity, the Vietnam War, and jazz and blues. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection...
American author
Marilynne Robinson is an American author known for her graceful language and studied observations on humankind and religion in works of fiction and nonfiction. Her best-known works include her debut novel,...
American writer
Harper Lee was an American writer nationally acclaimed for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), one of the most widely read works of fiction in American literature. A coming-of-age story about a childâs...
American composer
Richard Rodgers was one of the dominant composers of American musical comedy, known especially for his works in collaboration with the librettists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Rodgers wrote more...
American composer and conductor
John Adams is an American composer and conductor whose works are among the most-performed of contemporary classical music. Adams became proficient on the clarinet at an early age (sometimes freelancing...
American writer
Anna Quindlen is an American columnist and novelist who in 1992 became the third woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Her columns were noted for seeming to speak directly to each of her readers...
American writer
Annie Dillard was an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world. In 1975 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, an essay collection based...
American author and activist
Barbara Kingsolver is an American writer and political activist whose best-known novels concern the endurance of people living in often inhospitable environments and the beauty to be found even in such...
American poet
Robert Lowell was an American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry. The publication of his collection Life Studies (1959) is regarded as a watershed moment in American literature. It is...
American composer
Aaron Copland was an American composer who achieved a distinctive musical characterization of American themes in an expressive modern style. Copland, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in New...
American novelist
Throughout his life Upton Sinclair rarely encountered a cause he wouldnât take to a soapbox about. An advocate for socialism, health, temperance, and free speech, he is best known for his classic muckraking...
American author
Jhumpa Lahiri is an English-born American novelist and short-story writer whose works illuminate the immigrant experience, in particular that of East Indians. She won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000...