NEW YORK'Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize yesterday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favoured classical music and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.

"I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award. Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a tragic, but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize.

The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, which, like Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play "loosely autobiographical," a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.

"It's a play I have been working on in my head and on paper for many years now," said Letts, reached by The Associated Press in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where August had its world premiere last summer.

Star theatre critic Richard Ouzounian says yesterday's win surprised nobody and delighted everybody.

The buzz had been strong since the play opened in Chicago that it was the script to beat.

When it moved to New York last fall, with its Steppenwolf production virtually intact, it received the kind of rave reviews serious plays seldom get any more.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, a National Book Award winner for Time and Materials, won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's Failure. Other winners yesterday: Daniel Walker Howe, for history, for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945; for biography, John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.

Dylan's victory doesn't mean the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion.

Long after most of his contemporaries died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour and release highly regarded CDs, most recently Modern Times.

His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences.

His memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.

The Associated Press, with files

from Richard Ouzounian

ADVERTISEMENT

Iconocast is about learning and teaching without borders; we offer eMarketing, Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Online Branding, and eMarketing News Services.

Iconocast Home Page

Contact Iconocast

Iconocast Health Articles

© 2003-07. ICONOCAST is a trademark of iconocast.com.