Books

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

Mr. Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday. It cited his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

This is the first time Pulitzer judges – who have long favored 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 Mr. Dylan's award.

Mr. Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – a tragic, humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States – won the fiction prize. Mr. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel – "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he said Monday – and at one point included a section about Mr. Dylan.

The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County , which, like Mr. Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality.

Mr. Letts grew up in Durant, Okla., and got his start as an actor in Dallas as a teenager before moving to Chicago in his early 20s. While in Dallas, he appeared in, among other plays, Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre. Mr. Letts' first play, Killer Joe, was set in a trailer park outside Dallas. That play and his others, Bug and Man From Nebraska (a 2004 Pulitzer finalist), have all been produced locally.

Mr. Letts calls August: Osage County "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," Mr. Letts said from Chicago. "There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide [for example] that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years. I always thought, 'Well, that's the stuff of drama right there.' "

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for Time and Materials, won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's Failure.

Dallas will have a chance to hear Mr. Hass soon – he'll be speaking at 7 p.m. April 18 as part of Arts & Letters Live.

Other winners Monday:

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

John Matteson, biography, for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

"I am surprised, grateful, overjoyed – and a little embarrassed to do this with my first book," said Mr. Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City, who added that his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration. "Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book."

Mr. Dylan's victory doesn't mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion, which opened last fall at Carnegie Hall.

"Bob Dylan is the most frequently played artist in my household so the idea that I am honored at the same time as Bob Dylan, that is humbling," Mr. Lang said.

Long after most of his contemporaries have died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Mr. Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and to release highly regarded CDs, most recently Modern Times. Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics – even digging through his garbage for clues – since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made him a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.

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.

According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Mr. Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.

The Associated Press, staff reports

Find a complete list of arts finalists and read an archive interview with Junot Diaz at Texas Pages books blog.