General Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold
Compared to some of the other titles on this list, Eliza Griswold’s Pulitzer nonfiction winner seems to fly a bit more under the radar: It didn’t top best-seller lists, receive other prizes, or earn a windfall of Best-Book-of-the-Year praise. But Griswold spent seven years on research that would eventually become Amity and Prosperity, named a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Jury members included acclaimed author Roxane Gay and New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer; the committee called Griswold’s book “a classic American story, grippingly told, of an Appalachian family struggling to retain its middle class status in the shadow of destruction wreaked by corporate fracking.”
“Thoroughly reported and tightly paced, Amity and Prosperity is an essential document of the region’s latest go-round with the riches underfoot,” writes Erika Howsare for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
General nonfiction finalists: In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush