Photo by Jim Gipe

Even though he knew that the announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners would be made at 3:30 pm on Monday—and that there was speculation he would win—Joe Ellis stuck to his regular routine. The Ford Foundation Professor of History and nationally recognized American history scholar taught a class on the Vietnam War from 1:15 to 2:30 pm and then called Richard Moran to see if the sociology professor wanted to take a jog around the lake. The two run several miles together just about every day, but Moran said he had too much work to do and couldn't make it. With his golden retriever for company, Ellis set out. He was on his second lap when he spotted Moran in the distance yelling something. Ellis thought that perhaps a family member had been in an accident; he ran faster. As he approached a wildly gesturing Moran, Ellis heard his friend saying, "You won." Recalls Ellis, "As I was asking Richard ‘What did I win?' it registered what it must be." Only after he finished his workout did he go home.

The hours that followed were definitely not routine. They were filled with an Associated Press photo shoot, interviews, and champagne. But by the end of the day, "the pleased and overjoyed" Ellis was preparing for his 1 pm class on Tuesday. It had been quite a Patriot's Day for a man who has made a career out of researching and illuminating this country's earliest, and arguably most influential, patriots.

Ellis won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf, 2000). The book, his seventh, focuses on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, who, together, within a decade, shaped the American political system we know today. Ellis's previous book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf, 1997) was a National Book Award winner. The Pulitzer Prize is one of this country's most prestigious awards and sought-after accolades in journalism, letters, and music. More than 2,000 entries are submitted each year in the Pulitzer Prize competitions, and only twenty-one awards are normally made. The awards are the culmination of a yearlong process that begins early in the year with the appointment of 102 distinguished judges who serve on twenty separate juries and are asked to make three nominations in each of the twenty-one categories.

Says President Creighton, "We are all very proud of Joe. He is a wonderful teacher and citizen of the College, as well as a writer of great distinction and style. A Pulitzer Prize is a fitting tribute to the quality of his work. It has been fun to track the success of Founding Brothers, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for eighteen weeks. I'm not surprised it has been so successful. It's a completely engrossing book—a great read, I discovered, as I took it with me on my last trip to the West Coast."

The Pulitzer Prize In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes, renowned publisher and journalist Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) specified four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and four traveling scholarships. In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel, an original American play performed in New York, a book on the history of the United States, an American biography, and a history of public service by the press. But, sensitive to the progression of his society Pulitzer made provision for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an advisory board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time." He also empowered the board to withhold any award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. Since the inception of the prizes in 1917, the board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to twenty-one and introduced poetry, music, and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of Pulitzer’s will and its intent.

Among Ellis's other books are Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (W. W. Norton 1993), a Book-of-the-Month Club and History Club selection and winner of the Daughters of the American Revolution Award; and After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (W. W. Norton, 1979). He has authored numerous essays, reviews, and opinion pieces that have appeared in American Heritage, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, New Republic, U.S. News & World Report, and elsewhere. He has appeared many times on C-SPAN, Fox News, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio, and worked as a consultant and appeared as a participant in the Ken Burns documentary Thomas Jefferson, which aired on PBS in 1997. Among his many honors and fellowships are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship, and an honorary degree from William and Mary, his alma mater.

Ellis received a Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at Yale and West Point before coming to Mount Holyoke. A former United States Army officer, he has lectured at the Army War College and at West Point on the Vietnam War and on the education of Army officers in the post-Cold War era. He served as dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke from 1980 through 1990.

Mount Holyoke's history department has produced two other Pulitzer Prize winners. Peter Viereck, Professor Emeritus of History, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for his first book of poems, Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940–1948 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). A member of the Mount Holyoke College faculty beginning in 1948, Viereck retired in 1987 but continued to teach his survey of Russian history until 1996–97. History professor William McFeely, a Mount Holyoke professor from 1970 to 1986, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Grant: A Biography (W. W. Norton, 1981). In addition, Ben L. Reid, an English professor at the College between 1948 and 1949 and from 1957 to 1983 won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (Oxford University Press, 1968).