Mailer Prize

2009 Lifetime Achievement Prize

TONI MORRISON

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities Emerita at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.

Her nine major novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, and A Mercy, have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved.

Ms. Morrison has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Colombia, Brown, University of Michigan, École Normale Supérieure, Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, and the Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV. She was also the first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987 and was a New York State Governor’s Arts Awardee in 1986. Other prestigious awards include: the Du Bois Medal, 2005; the 2000 National Humanities Medal; the 2000 Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend Award; the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature, 1994; the Condorcet Medal, Paris, 1994; Pearl Buck Award, 1994; Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Paris, 1993; the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in Literature, 1989; Sara Lee Corporation Front Runner Award in the Arts, 1989; Anisfield Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988; the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 1978; and the Distinguished Writer Award of 1978 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1993 Ms. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

2009 Distinguished Journalism Prize

DAVID HALBERSTAM (1934 - 2007)

Accepted by Jean Halberstam on behalf of her husband

David Halberstam was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, business, media, and American culture, and his later sports journalism.

In the mid-1960s, Halberstam covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times. In the spring of 1967, he traveled with Martin Luther King from New York City to Cleveland and then to Berkeley for a Harper’s article, “The Second Coming of Martin Luther King.” In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at The New York Times, including his eyewitness account of the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war.

Halberstam next wrote about President John F. Kennedy‘s foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War in The Best and the Brightest. After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam went to work on his next book, which became 1979’s The Powers That Be, featuring profiles of media titans like William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Phil Graham of The Washington Post. In 1997, Halberstam received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. In the wake of 9/11, Halberstam wrote a book about the attacks, Firehouse, which describes in detail Engine 40, Ladder 35 of the New York City Fire Department. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, Halberstam’s last book, was published posthumously in September 2007.