Pulitzer honors alumni, professor

When this year's Pulitzer prizes were awarded yesterday afternoon, the University community was well represented with two alumni, one current faculty member and one former professor taking home the honor.

Paul Muldoon, humanities professor, won the prize for poetry for his collection of works, "Moy Sand and Gravel."

"Moy Sand and Gravel" is Muldoon's 25th volume of poetry and includes verse set in places like present-day New Jersey and Ireland as Muldoon knew it while growing up in the 1950s.

"I think it is richly deserved," said professor Edmund White, also director of the creative writing program.

"He is a real man of letters . . . In his work he shows a fascinating blend of Irish and American themes and speech."

Muldoon joins an already distinguished group of professors in the University's creative writing program as the fourth to have won a Pulitzer Prize. Current faculty who have also won the award include poet Yusef Komunyakaa and authors John McPhee '53 and Toni Morrison.

"It's a delight, of course, to win a Pulitzer Prize," Muldoon said in an email. "Above all, it's a surprise, just as a poem, ideally, is a surprise. I'm still wondering how it happened, just as one wonders how a poem could possibly have happened."

Two former Daily Princetonian managing editors also won the prize yesterday.

Levy

Clifford Levy '89, a reporter for The New York Times, took home the award for investigative journalism.

Levy authored a series of exposés about private-run, state-regulated adult homes for the mentally ill in New York state. The articles examined negligence and abuse of the mentally ill in these institutions, Levy said.

"I'm very gratified and fortunate to have worked on the project," Levy said. "There was reaction from the state government after the articles came out. I'm happy that a lot of reforms came about because of the articles."

Levy graduated from the Wilson School and concentrated on South Asian development. He started working for The New York Times in 1990 and is now employed as a projects reporter.

Caro

Robert Caro '57 won for his biography "Master of the Senate" about President Lyndon Johnson's rise to prominence in the United States Senate.

The work is the third in a four part series documenting Johnson's rise to power through the ranks of his local Texas political machine, the House of Representatives and Senate and culminating with his years as president. This part of the series depicts Johnson during his Senate tenure. Caro is still working on the fourth part of the Johnson series.

After graduating from Princeton with a degree in English, Caro worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday and also spent time at Harvard University as a Nieman fellow.

Caro admitted that he never intended to write books "documenting the lives of famous men." Rather, when he started work on his first Pulitzer Prize winning work, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," Caro wanted to use the biographical medium as a "study of urban power."

"I always wanted to use books to show how political power influences people's lives," Caro said. "Johnson was a great example of that in the 20th century."

Caro spent years researching Johnson's life. He published "The Path to Power," the first in the series, in 1982 and followed it with the second part, "Means of Ascent," in 1990.

"It's wonderful to have someone say that all those years of work are worthwhile," said Caro in reference to his award.

Eugenides

Former visiting professor in creative writing, Jeffrey Eugenides also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book "Middlesex."

Eugenides taught fiction workshops at Princeton three years ago while writing "Middlesex," White said.