Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805071784 ISBN 13: 9780805071788

Publisher: Times Books, 2002

Synopsis

With each news day, history unfolds as steadfast journalists uncover facts and public opinion. Drawn from the New York Times's archive of an unparalleled eighty-one Pulitzer Prizes, Written into History offers a fascinating record of the twentieth century.

The Times's award-winning reports range from Antarctic dispatches on the Byrd expedition to the eyewitness account of the atomic bomb, from the First Amendment battle to publish the Pentagon Papers to the personal narrative of an interracial friendship. Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis culled the newspaper's most acclaimed writing to chronicle life and history as it was happening, with such highlights as David Halberstam on Vietnam, J. Anthony Lukas on hippies, Anna Quindlen on AIDS, and John F. Burns on the Taliban.

Lewis tells the stories behind the stories, describing journalism's changing role in the world. For armchair historians and aspiring reporters, this is a rich and memorable portrait of a century by the men and women who most artfully observed it.

About this title

Review

Nearly a century has passed since the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer endowed the journalism prize that bears his name, observing, "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to known the right and the courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery." Over that period, The New York Times and its writers have taken more Pulitzer prizes than any other newspaper, and the sampling of their work that Anthony Lewis offers in this collection ably shows why this should be so.

Taking in book reviews, commentaries on art and architecture, editorials, news pieces, and work that falls into the comparatively new genre of "news analysis," that sampling is more than a celebration of a single newspaper, influential though it may be; it is also a record of historical events as they have unfolded. An entry by Harrison Salisbury, for example, documents the Soviet Gulag system, "so routine, ordinary, and common ... that local residents seem not to have the slightest embarrassment about such phenomena." Another, by Sydney Schanberg, renders a surreal slice-of-life portrait of a Cambodian town undergoing round-the-clock shelling. Still another, by Nicholas Kristof, relates the tragedy of Tiananmen Square as "bullets swooshed overhead or glanced off buildings." Closer to home, the anthology also includes pieces on race relations in America, now-forgotten crimes, and the Reagan-era initiative to build the "Star Wars" antimissile system.

For readers with an interest in world history, contemporary affairs, and good writing alike, Lewis's anthology offers many rewards. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lewis is the author of Make No Law and the bestseller Gideon's Trumpet. In his nearly five decades of writing and reporting for The New York Times he served as the Times's London bureau chief for eight years and as a columnist for the paper from 1969 until 2001. A Visiting Lombard Lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, he lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0805071784
• ISBN 13: 9780805071788
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Lewis Anthony