Pulitzer-Winning Work to Read This Memorial Day

Immortalized by Burgess Meredith in William Wellman's "The Story of G.I. Joe" (a 1945 film that contains a dramatization of the Pulitzer announcement process featuring future 1951 International Reporting and 1953 National Reporting winner Don Whitehead), 1944 Correspondence winner Ernie Pyle represents a pinnacle of wartime journalism 75 years after he was killed by enemy fire on Iejima during the Battle of Okinawa in the final weeks of World War II. Seldom read in the 21st century despite his enduring fame and myriad attempts at anthologization, the Indiana-reared Pyle was a notable journalistic innovator. In an era where much of the news relied on elite sources, Pyle focused on cultivating a conversational style (honed through years on the Route 66-era highways with his wife as a travel columnist for Scripps-Howard) that focused on relatable figures like Petty Officer First Class George Razevich, a "former bartender and beer salesman" who would "bet on anything," or Lieutenant Jim Gray, an Army Air Force pilot who "looked like a Texan — wind-burned and unsmoothed." This approach made Pyle one of the most famous journalists in the world by the time he received his Pulitzer in June 1944, and he soon found that he was no longer capable of receding into the background, effectively becoming the story to the scores of soldiers and junior officers who recognized him on assignment. Although Pyle's work only touched upon a sliver of the geopolitical forces undergirding World War II, his work, lauded by the political antipodes of Dwight Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt, remains an essential guide to the comportment of the Greatest Generation in its finest hour.

The Pentagon Papers often are invoked in the context of presidential overreach and sparked one of the most important American media law cases of the 20th century, culminating in the 1972 Public Service Prize to The New York Times and the exoneration of Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation economist who leaked the documents to a group of Times reporters led by Neil Sheehan. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his coterie of "whiz kids" had failed in their attempt to apply the theoretical advances in corporate management and the social sciences to the military domain, and a group of wonks (led by Les Gelb, a political scientist who went on to pursue a career in journalism and share in the 1986 Explanatory Journalism Prize) attempted to reconcile this policy breakdown with the deaths of tens of thousands of American military personnel, including draftees and volunteers who did not share in postwar prosperity due to racism and socioeconomic inequalities. What emerged was a sense of unbridled capriciousness, from the emergence of South Vietnam as "essentially the creation of the United States" to the manipulation of President Ngo Dinh Diem by intelligence officials and the diminution of National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy in the aftermath of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. As the lawsuit between The Times and the Nixon administration dragged on, Sen. Mike Gravel employed a series of parliamentary tactics to read the history into the public record before breaking down in tears — driven less by the text than the fact that he, one of five children in a working-class family from Springfield, Mass., had served as an officer in the Army Counterintelligence Corps before finishing his undergraduate degree at Columbia on the G.I. Bill. For such reasons, the Papers — now fully declassified and available online — remain an important testament to the men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice to their country.

Fought at the beginning of July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest confrontation in the American Civil War, ultimately resulting in nearly 50,000 casualties on the Pennsylvania battlefield. The failure of Pickett's Charge, a kamikaze-like gambit authorized by Robert E. Lee in which 12,500 Confederate soldiers went directly against the Union line in the hope that a vital road could be seized, led the general to retreat to Virginia, constituting the turning point of the war. On November 19, Abraham Lincoln used the dedication of a monument at the site to call for "a new birth of freedom" in the historic Gettysburg Address. A little more than a century later, Florida State University creative writing instructor and science fiction writer Michael Shaara was driving home from the New York World's Fair to Tallahassee in 1964 when a visit to the battlefield inspired his magnum opus. Published a decade later by David McKay Company after 15 rejections, "The Killer Angels" recasts the momentous events through Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Bowdoin College foreign languages professor-turned-"civilian colonel" who received the Medal of Honor for leading the defense of the strategically important Little Round Top hill while suffering from complications of malaria and dysentery. Chamberlain, who went by his middle name and was fluent in 10 languages, was famously laconic — in his journal, he characterized his meritorious leadership thusly: "At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet. The word was enough..." — and Shaara ably invokes his Yankee literary spirit: "As he walked he forgot his pain; his heart began to beat quickly, and he felt an incredible joy. He looked at himself, wonderingly, at the beloved men around him, and he said to himself: Lawrence, old son, treasure this moment. Because you feel as a man can feel." With an ensemble cast of supporting characters ranging from the vain, hubristic Lee to commanding Union Maj. Gen. George Meade, the "old stork" whose near-incompetence throughout the battle set the stage for the ascent of Ulysses Grant, "The Killer Angels" definitively allays the romanticism of earlier Civil War fiction while attesting to the power of a righteous cause in the most unlikely and dangerous circumstances.