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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-09-10
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THE WEEK, Page 37ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTThe Way We Live Now
Pulitzers celebrate a corn-fed Lear and a truly off-Broadway play
The American Dream ain't what it used to be. So it seemed
fitting that literary explorations of the tattered myths that
once bound this country together led the pack for this year's
Pulitzer Prizes.
Novelist Jane Smiley won the fiction award for A Thousand
Acres, a heartrending Americanization of King Lear in which a
prosperous Iowa farmer divides his land among three daughters.
Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet by Lewis B. Puller
Jr. was cited in the biography category. Puller, whose late
father "Chesty" was America's most decorated Marine, lost both
his legs while serving as a lieutenant in Vietnam. The son's
memoir provides unsparing commentary on how the nation has
survived the agonies and complexities of that bitter conflict.
The nonfiction award went to The Prize: The Epic Quest for
Oil, Money and Power, energy specialist Daniel Yergin's
best-selling history of oil and how it has misshaped culture in
the U.S., from fast food to foreign policy. The Pulitzer Board
also voted a special award to Art Spiegelman, editor of the
avant-garde graphic magazine Raw, for his unusual Maus tales,
an autobiographical chronicle in comic-book form about the
Holocaust, its survivors and their children in which Jews are
portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats.
The biggest surprise came when the award for drama was
announced: The Kentucky Cycle, a six-hour historical saga by the
relatively unknown playwright Robert Schenkkan -- and the first
play to win a Pulitzer without ever having been produced in New
York City. His epic, which spans 200 years of American history
as experienced by three eastern Kentucky families, premiered in
Seattle last June and completed a six-week run in Los Angeles
last month.
Disturbed by the growing gap between rich and poor in the
U.S., Schenkkan, who grew up in Texas and lives in California,
wrote the first of the nine plays that make up the Cycle in
1984, following a visit to Kentucky. "Society falls apart when
the underlying myth no longer functions," he says, paraphrasing
Joseph Campbell. "Now there's a quest for a new mythology, and
I'd like to think this play is part of that search."