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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The men got out of work, out of the factories and the timber yards and the cement factories at 5:30. They would come home on Friday night, most of them, wash themselves to here, from here to here, never below. No, people didn't touch themselves with water from one end of the year to the other. They'd come home, wash their hands, throw water on their faces, have their Friday night tea, which was an egg because it was Friday, and then the women would give the price of a few pints and they'd go out and they'd have a few pints, talk, sing a few songs, come home, have tea, go to bed, and go to work the next morning. Five thirty, they were out. By six o'clock most of them were home for that wash and their tea. The Angelus would ring all over Limerick in all the churches and the women would wait, but my mother would wait on tenterhooks. If he wasn't home by 6:00 o'clock, boom, boom, bong, bong all around the city. If he wasn't home by the time the Angelus rang, he wasn't coming home and then she'd sink deeper and deeper into the chair by the fire, because we knew then the wages were gone and he'd arrive home after the pubs were closed, roaring and singing down the lane, "Roddy McCorley Goes to Die," and all the patriotic songs. He grieved over Ireland and didn't care if we starved to death that night and the next day.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The minute I opened my mouth then they'd say, "Oh, you're Irish." Suddenly I'm labeled. I wasn't a human being. In Ireland I was just a low-class type, but here I'm a low-class Irish type, an Irish low-class type. So I didn't know. Somehow I had to deal with that. "Oh, you're Irish." And at that time, that was 1949, there was still some kind of a lingering residue of prejudice against the Irish. People used to tell me, all the people, up and down New England (I'm in New York) there would be signs saying, "No Irish need apply." And even the Irish-Americans would listen to me and they'd patronize me. I was a bit simple as if I had just come off a farm. And I knew better than that. I knew I was better than that. People who -- Irish-Americans who were running elevators and working as porters, they were looking down on me, and I knew then that I was again at the bottom of the heap.
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David McCullough
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography
David McCullough: Years ago, when I was first brave enough, when I'd summoned the courage to decide I was going to attempt writing a book, I met a man one night at a party. And he was an elderly fellow, and I was about 28 years old, and I had heard -- his name was Harry Sinclair Drago, and he wrote Westerns -- and a friend said to me, "You see that old fellow over there? That's Harry Drago. He's written over 100 books." And I thought, "I'd like to talk to him." So I went over, and I said, "Mr. Drago, I - -somebody told me that you've written over 100 books." He said, "Yes, that's right." I said, "How do you do that?" He said, "Four pages a day, that's how you write 100 books. That's how you write books."
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W.S. Merwin
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry
I don't know how it works, I really don't. It comes from hearing things rather than from having ideas. I've got notes that I have made over the years, and they are very precious to me, and I sometimes ponder over the notes and see what I thought I was doing writing that down, where it was going. The notes are usually things that I seem to have overheard rather than -- they are not ideas. There is a wonderful conversation that Zola -- no, it wasn't Zola, it was Degas. Degas and Mallarmé, the French poet Mallarmé, were good friends for a long time. And Degas had always wanted to be a poet and he said to Mallarmé, "I don't understand it, year after year I've written poems and they are terrible, I know they are terrible, I know they aren't any good at all." And he said, "I don't understand it, because I have such good ideas." And Mallarmé said, "Oh, but poetry is not made with ideas; it's made with words, you have to hear the words."
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