The Kind of Nonfiction That Wins Pulitzers

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The Pulitzer Prizes, whose 2026 honorees were announced this week, reward excellent American journalism, music, drama, and books. Public conversation about the six categories of book awards tends to focus on the fiction prize, especially in years when the winner is unusually commercial, such as 2018’s Less, or obscure, like this year’s Angel Down, or not chosen at all, as in 2012. The medal for poetry gets little attention, and critics seldom scrutinize the four nonfiction selections. But if you do look closely at the history, biography, memoir, and general-nonfiction honors, a noticeable pattern emerges. The picks typically share a particular quality, according to my colleague Gal Beckerman, who often writes about nonfiction. The juries go for “books that cover social issues in human (almost novelistic) ways,” he told me. “These are about serious topics, but approached with literary flair.”First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: The secret of Elizabeth Strout’s appeal For Ibram X. Kendi, it’s Nazis all the way down. How Everest has changed since Into Thin Air “Reflections in the Door of a School Bus and Other Doors,” a poem by Athena Nassar This year’s honorees fit Beckerman’s mold. Jill Lepore, the winner in history for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, grounds sweeping ideas about the evolution of democracy in earthy portraits of the people who fought over them. An excerpt published in The Atlantic begins, “Bushy-browed, pipe-smoking, piano-playing Antonin Scalia—Nino—the scourge of the left, knew how to work a crowd.” When the Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber described why Lepore’s earlier history These Truths was among the best books of 2018, she wrote: “Who else but Lepore would think to describe James K. Polk as having ‘eyes like caverns and hair like smoke’?” In a similar vein, the new winner in general