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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
My mother was always amused by my father. He had a laconic sense of humor, and she was a good storyteller too, because she'd go to the movies and we couldn't go. We didn't have the money. She'd come home and tell us the whole movie frame by frame. She went to see a movie once called Reap the Wild Wind with Paulette Goddard and John Wayne who was a bad guy in there, and Ray Milland, and she told us every line of that and we sat around the fire. I remember that fire, looking into the flames darting and leaping, and she's telling the story and we're having tea. So this is what we got from them. No television. There was no television. No. We had none of that. We had no electricity so we couldn't have anything. But there was always this stuff going on between us at home and in the streets and with the neighbors. That was rich.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
I remember reading James Baldwin talking about his mother fighting the cockroaches, trying to keep the kitchen clean, trying to keep things growing up in Harlem, and I said, "That's it. This man understands," because you read so little about poverty in American literature or any other literature. There was Dickens, I know, but Dickens -- I became suspicious of him because he had all those happy endings. I wish Oliver Twist had died of TB, or David Copperfield. That used to piss me off when they're all -- they all found out they were related to somebody in the Royal Family or some damn thing. So when I came across Baldwin and George Orwell's book Down and Out in Paris and London and another one called The Road to Wigan Pier, they had -- he knew. He knew the details, the stink of poverty.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
We were asked to write about a single thing, an object in our childhood. And the object that meant most to me that was so significant was the bed I slept in with my brothers, all four of us. This half acre of a bed with a disaster of a mattress, which collapsed in the middle. Everybody peed in the bed, so the spring was gone, and we tried to keep it together with bits of string, but after a while the acid from our bodies rotted the string. We'd get into bed and we'd roll into the middle, the four of us, and fight, "Get out of my way." Meanwhile the fleas were feasting on us. And if you had to go the john you went to a bucket and so on and came back. And we were -- we'd light a candle to get at the -- and we'd hold the candle and we'd go slapping at each other's legs and bodies killing the fleas. That was probably the most concrete image I brought away from my childhood and I wrote about that. The professor gave me an "A+." And I said, "Jesus, this is very strange." And then he says, "Please read this to the class." And I said, "No." "Would you?" "No." "Would you please?" I said, "No, I'd be ashamed." And he read it. He said, "Do you mind if I read it?" So he read it to the class and I think they sensed that I was the one who wrote it, and good looking girls started looking at me in an interested way, but I thought they'd be -- I thought they'd be disgusted. But I found myself being stalked leaving the class that day. "Is that how you grew up?" And it seemed -- I seemed to suddenly have become kind of an exotic in the class.
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Frank McCourt
Pulitzer Prize for Biography
I realized that I hadn't finished my story. I had brought it up to the age of 19, but what I wanted to show was, I think, the effects of that childhood, the poverty and the religion, and everything else on a young man coming to New York. What it does to your self-esteem, how I was damaged and also how I benefited from it. Because no matter what I say about the poverty, there was a richness. No matter what I said about the church, there was a richness in that religious experience. If we hadn't had the church, the architecture, which was Neo-Gothic or Neo-Byzantine -- I don't know what the hell it was. But there was the liturgy, the Latin, the ceremonial, the sense of mystery, the sense of awe, the sense of wonder, and the power, the art, the duplicated paintings of the stations of the cross, all of that.
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David McCullough
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography
Thornton Wilder was asked how he got the ideas for his books, and he said -- or his plays -- and he said, "I imagine a story that I would like to read, or see done on the stage. And if nobody has written that book or that play, I write it so that I can read it or I can see it on the stage." Well, I wanted to be able to read a really first-rate book about the incredible story behind the disaster at Johnstown in 1889, and I found there was no such book. But having read that interview I thought, "Well maybe you could write the book that you would like to read." And I am convinced that the only way we ever really learn anything is by doing it.
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W.S. Merwin
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry
When we talk about the extinction of species, I think the endangered species of the arts and of language and all these things are related. I don't think there is any doubt about that. I think poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it's got a subject and the subject comes first and it's dealing with the subject. But poetry is something else, and we don't know what it is (that) comes first. Prose is about something, but poetry is about what can't be said. Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can't say it. They can't say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can't be said. I think that's the big difference between poetry and prose. All the arts, in a way, are doing that, they are talking about, "Dove sono? (Where are they?)" What's that? She can't say it, can she? Where are they? Where are they? What has happened to those days?
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