Pulitzers Prized from the Past

Yesterday the 2005 Pulitzer winners were announced, and the experts at Poynter were only surprised by a few. Hardly anyone was surprised because a group of judges leaked the results, according to Poynter's report.

This year featured another small-market feel-good winner in Investigative Reporting, the prize which shows the kind of "All the President's Men" moxie. Last year the paper in my birthplace, the Toledo Blade, won in Investigative for an expose on the Tiger Force. This year's winner was an even smaller paper, the Willamette Week, a weekly in Portland, Ore. that reported the state's governor had molested his 14-year-old babysitter almost 30 years ago.

Both papers who have won this award since 2004 mined the past. It seems to be a compelling playground for Pulitzer winners. The Blade's series also focused on misdeeds committed more than three decades ago. The Willamette Week won against The New York Times, revealing that thousands of vulnerable American soldiers were exploited by some insurance companies, investment firms and lenders, and The Des Moines Register for an expose of injustice in the handling of traffic tickets by public officials.

In my novel I've got a Pulitzer winner who uncovers misdeeds in camps that house plague victims, 20 years from now. I can only hope that by then the bar for investigative impact rises above traffic tickets and babysitters. The bigger papers seem to be reaching for current day misdeeds.

The literature winner Marilynne Robinson won for her second novel, Gilead, "a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part." Abolition, the Civil War and spirit mixed together across generations. Another reach toward the past.

In Drama, the fellow who wrote the Moonstruck screenplay and won an Oscar for it nabbed a Pulitzer for his latest play. John Patrick Shanley won for "Doubt." But it too is set in the past, 1964.