This week’s “Why’s this so good?” post looked at Brady Dennis’ 296-word story about a toll booth operator’s love for the wife he lost to cancer. The piece ran in 2005 as part of the St. Petersburg Times’ occasional series “300 words.” Dennis has since moved on to The Washington Post, where he is an [...]
Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize
“Why’s this so good?” No. 18: Brady Dennis goes short
November 1, 2011 – 10:44 am
A few years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around the front porch of this crumpled old resort in the Catskills, knocking back drinks and talking shop. I can’t remember how it began, but when the sun went down we developed a game: Tell a story in a minute. It started off cool enough, [...]
Jack Hart on “Storycraft” and narrative nonfiction as an American literary form
October 20, 2011 – 4:41 pm
A soup-to-nuts look at narrative nonfiction, Jack Hart’s “Storycraft” breaks down different approaches to telling true stories and the components that make or break them. In writing the book, Hart brought to bear a doctorate, years of teaching in college classrooms, and a quarter-century of experience at The Oregonian, where he edited several stories selected as [...]
Amy Harmon on getting readers “to think about the limits of their own tolerance”
October 14, 2011 – 4:31 pm
Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World.” Amy Harmon’s story follows Justin Canha, an autistic man in his early 20s, and the many people trying to help him learn to live independently. A reporter for the New York Times, Harmon has won two Pulitzer Prizes: one in [...]
Gene Weingarten on “the god of journalism,” compulsive editing and “The Peekaboo Paradox”
September 28, 2011 – 7:33 pm
After some months spent planning to write about Gene Weingarten’s story “The Peekaboo Paradox” for this site, I caught up with the two-time Pulitzer winner in Texas this summer at the Mayborn Conference. And when I say caught, I mean caught. I had never met Weingarten before, but I saw the highly recognizable, highly mustachioed [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 13: Gene Weingarten peels the Great Zucchini
September 27, 2011 – 11:30 am
The Great Zucchini has a secret. And in “The Peekaboo Paradox,” Gene Weingarten exhumes the history that haunts the most popular children’s entertainer in Washington, D.C. The story, which ran in January 2006, is the best thing ever written by the Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer winner. (Surprisingly enough, Weingarten agrees with this statement.) “A children’s [...]
Gene Weingarten on journalistic ethics: two case studies from his career
August 11, 2011 – 11:41 am
The final session of last month’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference offered The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten in conversation with Brian Sweany, deputy editor of Texas Monthly. Weingarten, who does a weekly humor column for the Post, has won two Pulitzer Prizes: one in 2008 for his experiment putting a world-class violinist outside a subway stop [...]
Lane DeGregory on diving into Florida dreams
July 6, 2011 – 12:58 pm
Our first Editors’ Roundtable of the month looked at a story from Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times, in which a young couple arrives in Florida hoping to start a new life. DeGregory won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2009 for “The Girl in the Window” and has received many other awards [...]
