Five Pulitzer-Winning Books to Read This Labor Day

From conducting radio interviews with Dorothy Parker and Big Bill Broonzy to participating in a lawsuit against the Bush administration's warrentless wiretap policies in the mid-2000s, Studs Terkel's career bridged decades of American history. Beginning with 1970s "Hard Times," an account of the Great Depression, the journalist and actor became a pioneer in the field of oral history, leading to commercial success with its bestselling follow-up, "Working" (1974). In his Prize-winning "The Good War" (1984), Terkel performed an almost revolutionary act: redefining the horrors of World War II through its participants instead of the tactical deliberations of political and military leaders. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith offers frank insights into his oversight of price controls as the war approached ("Our proudest mark was that we were Roosevelt men," he writes), while on the other end of the spectrum, Nazi prisoner of war Red Prendergast (who went on to become the sales manager of a Chicago trade magazine) details his consumption of a dog's jaw with venal ardor ("Terrific. Just like a T-bone"). In the denouement, the reader experiences firsthand accounts of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as understated as they are chilling, "I was looking up in the sky, trying to spot an airplane," an unidentified woman recalled in 1960 tapes that subsequently were procured by Terkel. "Then I saw a big flash in the sky, so I hid my face in the ground. I must have been blown away by the impact." Although these discomfiting experiences contextualize the camaraderie that linked the rarefied likes of Galbraith with enlisted men in their mission, they suggest that it could manifest again for a more pacifistic project. War, in Terkel's revelatory volume, is most certainly hell.

After receiving her master's degree in English and working a variety of odd jobs, Annie Dillard settled in a rural area near Roanoke in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. There, she began publishing the essays that ultimately would comprise her Prize-winning "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Dillard concerned herself with the problem of theodicy: Why would a good God allow for the divisiveness, rancor and destruction of the contemporary world? Even the systemic renewal of nature, proves a clamorous, raucous force in the mechanical present: "When I read how many thousands of dollars a city like New York has to spend to keep underground water pipes free of ailanthus, ginko, and sycamore roots," I cannot help but to give a little cheer," she declares. Much of the work in "Pilgrim" is tied to a Thoreauvian commitment to awareness which reaches its apogee in the winter solstice's profusion of natural death, when Dillard, who waits for an hour at a nearby quarry, finds comity with a bee: "Hello! I tried tentatively: Hello! faltered the cliffs under the forest; and did the root tips quiver in the rock? But that is no way to kill a creature, saying hello. Goodbye! I shouted. Goodbye! came back, and the bee drifted unconcerned among the weeds." These circumstances provokesa final realization: "There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly." If the contemplative life is frequently caricatured as a frivolous diversion from reality, Dillard argues it may be far more pressing than workaday life.

Following an MFA in poetry from NYU and doctoral studies in literary criticism and theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, Gregory Pardlo was in the midst of completing an MFA in creative nonfiction when he received the 2015 Poetry Prize for "Digest." The stylistic variations of his studies suffuses much of his work and parallels the poet's varied life, which has taken him from an inchoate future in the aftermath of his father's participation in the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike (depicted in his recent memoir, "Air Traffic") to tenure-track professorship. Often narrative in its approach, "Digest" is a bricolage of cultural referents that frequently pertain to labor, from the virtuosity of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page ("Those hammer-ons on 'Over the Hills' made/my fingers bleed [...] Child of Crowley, Bukka White, paddling hips across the stage") to unpacking "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," a two-volume collaboration between philosopher Giles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari that has influenced academic discourse in a variety of fields: "[W]ho speaks/for this Diaspora heedless of empire's/mundane cartography?" Pardlo also works to understand the quondam, reading Euripedes "between commercial breaks" in anticipation of a forthcoming class and, later in "Problema 2," "[lending] a neighborly ear to elderly West Indians" on the bus as they pontificate on their outmoded parenting methods. "What I do for this night/I do for you, Brooklyn," Pardlo concludes, showing us the heterogeneity of labor in a postindustrial society.

Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s "The Visible Hand" is the culmination of one of the most unique scholarly projects in American historiography. One of the first academic historians to be based in a business school, the Harvard professor's data-driven approach was inspired by his training in sociologist Talcott Parsons' methodology of structural functionalism, which holds that society as a complex system oriented toward stability. However, his inheritance of the papers of distant ancestor Henry Varnum Poor, who published a wellspring of empirical arcana in the American Railroad Journal from 1849 to 1861 before co-founding the Standard & Poors financial services firm, proffered both a viable dissertation topic and a career-spanning leitmotif. Because stability-seeking businesses fundamentally were reactive and risk-averse in their orientation, Chandler contended, the Industrial Revolution mitigated the influence of owners and market forces by situating a managerial class as the interlocutor in the strategic process, leading to the baroque, "M-form" management structure of General Motors that privileged division-level autonomy and C-suite central planning. After delineating the basic tenets of his thesis in the case-driven "Strategy and Structure" (1962), he employed "The Visible Hand" as a prequel, charting the convergent influence of railroads, telegraphy, mass production and scientific management (in particular, the uniquely American innovation of organizational charts) on the behemoths chronicled in the earlier book. In summation: "Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over [...] despots." Although some of his proteges (including Apple's Richard Tedlow and Columbia's Richard John) have cultivated significant scholarly profiles in their own right, the Chandlerist center of business history would not hold by the turn of the century; in the years following the publication of "The Visible Hand," the mien of corporate administration shifted from the forces examined in his meticulous industrial research to entrepreneurship, deindustrialization and the maximization of shareholder value through deregulation and financial engineering, all developments that he denigrated.