NEW YORK, April 15: After winning virtually every major prize in one of the great literary careers of recent times, Philip Roth finally won a Pulitzer, receiving the fiction award for American Pastoral.Novels such as the outrageous Portnoy's Complaint and the comic trilogy Zuckerman Bound have made the 65-year-old Roth one of the world's most revered and talked-about writers. Roth won National Book Critics Circle awards for The Counterlife in 1988 and his 1992 memoir Patrimony. his novel Sabbath's Theater won a 1995 National Book Award.His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, came out in 1959.American Pastoral was a departure from such recent, introspective Roth fiction as Deception and Operation Shylock, in which the featured characters were writers with Roth's background, and even his name. This time, the plot was closer to a John Updike story: A high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey and what happens as he raises a family in theincreasingly militant 1960s.Once again, Don Delillo was a runner-up yesterday. Delillo, whose cold war novel Underworld was thought by many to be the year's best work of fiction, had been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize, but failed to win either. Delillo and Robert Stone, cited for Bear and His Daughter: Stories, were Pulitzer finalists yesterday.The prize for drama went to Paula Vogel for How I Learned to Drive, the story of a young woman molested by her uncle. The playwright said it was inspired by Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's novel of underage seduction.``I wondered if I could write the story from Lolita's point of view,'' Vogel said yesterday.Lolita is her favourite novel.``I kept the play in my head and worked on it for about 15 years. The writing itself happened in about two weeks.''The prize for biography was awarded to Personal History by Katharine Graham, chairman of the executive committee ofThe Washington Post co. Graham was publisher of the Post from 1969 to 1979 and its chairman of the board from 1973 to 1993.Aaron Jay Kernis won the music prize for `String quartet no. 2, Musica Instrumentalis'. The composer is a self-taught pianist who first won national attention with his 1983 orchestral work, `Dream of the Morning Sky.'NYT's 77th award The New York Times won the Pulitzer for foreign reporting for stories on Mexican corruption, while the public service award went to a North Dakota daily for reporting on the Grand Forks floods, Columbia University announced on Tuesday. The Grand Forks Herald won the prize, the most prestigious in US journalism. In addition to international reporting, The NYT won two other Pulitzers, bringing to 77 the number that the daily has garnered.
