Five Pulitzer Winners for High School Readers

At its core, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel is an exploration of the relationship between a father and son as the latter comes of age, and how the two manage to build a bridge across their generation and experience gap. Spiegelman's father was a Holocaust survivor and the cartoonist and writer has said, “I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.”

When two-time prize winner Russell Baker died in January, The New York Times (publisher of his prize-winning humor columns) printed an obituary with the following anecdote: "He was as devilish in person as in print. A fellow Times columnist, Tom Wicker, recalled that Mr. Baker, talking once to college students, was asked, 'What courses should a journalism school teach?' He replied: 'The ideal journalism school needs only one course. Students should be required to stand outside a closed door for six hours. Then the door would open, someone would put his head around the jamb and say, "No comment." The door would close again, and the students would be required to write 800 words against a deadline.'” His memoir of growing up during the Depression traces his path from rural Virginia to suburban New Jersey to Baltimore and was hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "a wondrous book, funny, sad, and strong."

Jennifer Egan's fascination with the music business, social media and romantic relationships all bubble up in her prize-winning novel. She has said, "People define themselves to some degree by the music they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally."

A longtime New York City high school teacher, author Frank McCourt maintained respect for his pupils and their literary opinions throughout his career, once recalling: "Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?" For McCourt, writing was one way to figure out what he did know, and his memoir of growing up poor in Ireland is both entertaining and illuminating.

Although "Beloved" is often required classroom reading, from which this list has largely veered away, Morrison's tale of the wide-ranging impacts of slavery on individuals, families, and the United States is a sometimes brutal reminder of where the country has been. Upon learning she had won the prize, the author said: ''I think I know what I feel. It's true that I had no doubt about the value of the book and that it was really worth serious recognition. But I had some dark thoughts about whether the book's merits would be allowed to be the only consideration of the Pulitzer committee. The book had begun to take on a responsibility, an extra-literary responsibility, that it was never designed for.''