Books

NEW YORK — The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded Monday to Junot Diaz, a 40-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who moved to New Jersey as a boy, for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

"I'm completely astonished," says Diaz, 39, who heard the news at his mom's house in New Jersey while holding his "good luck charm" — his 2-year-old nephew.

"For a Dominican kid with illegal parents to win a Pulitzer, a kid who grew up in New Jersey in a neighborhood where nobody gave a sh— about us, a kid who delivered pool tables throughout college ... wow, man."

Oscar Wao is the second book published by Diaz, who teaches creative writing at MIT and lives in New York City. He wowed the literary world 11 years ago with his story collection Drown, and in Oscar Wao, he combines an onslaught of savvy pop-culture references and the brutal history of the Trujillo regime and its lingering effects on a family relocated to New Jersey.

Time magazine compared Diaz to Philip Roth and Richard Russo. The New Yorker named him one of the top 20 writers of the 21st century. And famously cranky New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Diaz "has written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices."

Daniel Walker Howe won for history for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

Howe, a professor emeritus at Oxford and UCLA, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for What Hath God Wrought, which examines America from the Battle of New Orleans to the end of the war with Mexico.

David Halberstam, who was killed in a car crash last year at age 73, was nominated as a finalist in the history category for The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. Halberstam won a Pulitzer in journalism for international reporting in 1964 and was a finalist in general nonfiction in 2002.

John Matteson won for biography for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Matteson teaches English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"I am just beside myself with joy. I can't even believe this is happening!" Matteson said. He added he was "absolutely in no way, shape or form" expecting to win.

Saul Friedlander won the general nonfiction award for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

Two prizes were awarded for poetry: Robert Hass for Time and Materials and Philip Schultz for Failure.

Hass, 67, is a former U.S. poet laureate who grew up in San Francisco and still lives in the Bay Area. Schultz is founder of the Writer's Studio in New York and former director of New York University's graduate creative writing program.

Tracy Letts won the drama prize for his
brutal and dark comedy, August: Osage County. The play originated at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company last summer and opened in New York in December to some of the year's best reviews. Also nominated as finalists in the drama category were Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang and Dying City by Christopher Shinn.

After learning he had won the drama prize, Letts said, "Oh, man. It's pretty overwhelming. I'm sure it hasn't settled in yet."

He described the play as "loosely autobiographical."

"There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide, that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years," he said in a telephone interview from Chicago. "I always thought: 'Well, that's the stuff of drama right there."'

Letts' father, Dennis Letts, appeared in the cast as the Oklahoma patriarch whose disappearance sparks an acrimonious family reunion. Dennis Letts was diagnosed with cancer in September but continued performing eight shows a week, even while he was undergoing treatment, until the end of January. He died in February.

Connie Ogle of McClatchy Newspapers also contributed to this report.