S.F. author awarded Pulitzer for fiction
Andrew Sean Greer has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “Less.”
The Chronicle named it one of the top 10 books of 2017.
In her review for The Chronicle, Carmela Ciuraru called the book “philosophical, poignant, funny and wise, filled with unexpected turns.”
The novel centers on a struggling San Francisco author — Arthur Less — who, nearing age 50, decides to tour the world to escape himself. “The tragicomic business of being alive,” he says, “is getting to him.”
The Pulitzer judges praised “Less” as “a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.”
Greer is the author of five other books of fiction, including “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” “The Story of a Marriage” and “The Confessions of Max Tivoli.”
The author divides his time between San Francisco and Tuscany, where he is the executive director of the Santa Maddalena Foundation writers’ residency.
The Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction went to “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” by James Forman Jr. In his review for The Chronicle, Richard Thompson Ford
called the book by the former public defender “poignant and insightful.”
“Were tough-oncrime policies foisted on black communities by racist white politicians and police?” Ford adds. “‘Locking Up Our Own’ tells a more complicated story.”
The Pulitzer for history was awarded to “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” by Jack E. Davis. The judges hailed it as “an important environmental history of ... one of the planet’s most diverse and productive marine ecosystems.”
For biography, the prize went to “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” by Caroline Fraser, which the judges called “a deeply researched and elegantly written portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series.”
For a list of more Pulitzer Prize winners, go to www.pulitzer.org.
The poet Frank Bidart won for “Half-light: Collected Poems 19652016.” Born in Bakersfield, the acclaimed poet now lives in Cambridge, Mass. His collection won the National Book Award last year. John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF