Arts Pulitzers Make History the Big Winner

Washington writers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" on a day when historical topics dominated the Pulitzer awards for letters.

Geraldine Brooks won the fiction prize for her historical novel "March," which is set during the Civil War. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins won the general nonfiction award for "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya." University of Texas historian David M. Oshinsky's "Polio: An American Story" won in the category specifically designated for history.

The poetry award went to a work of personal history, Claudia Emerson's "Late Wife."

Sherwin has been working on the Oppenheimer biography for a quarter of a century. "It doesn't seem so long right now -- only 25 years!," Sherwin said yesterday from Bird's house on Biltmore Street NW, where the collaborators were celebrating.

"I'm grateful Marty convinced me to come aboard," said Bird, who joined the project in 2000 and got so caught up he found himself dreaming of Oppenheimer at night. "Writers always talk about how hard it is to write, but this was such a fun book."