Journal Article

The WRITER’S STUDIO with Pulitzer Prize Winners Beverly Gage and Jefferson Cowie

Cowie, Jefferson, Gage, Beverly

2024

Overview

For Beverly Gage, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer for Biography (G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, published by Viking Press), and Jefferson Cowie, recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer in History (Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, published by Basic Books), this culminating event has also afforded them the chance to pause and reflect on their careers and anticipate next steps. Because people don’t know these places, or don’t know this factory, or in the case of Freedom’s Dominion, Barbour County, know anything, it is really important to be able to picture it, smell it, feel it, and enter the history I hope to tell. [...]having taught at Yale for twenty years, I’ve become convinced that historians each have a unique writerly voice. Cowie: I think what I was unaware of in my conceputalization of projects, but eventually became explicit in my work, was my tendency to unpack what might just be a seemingly uninteresting place, or person, or event and see how the light can shine or be refracted in different directions out of that otherwise unremarkable thing, whether it’s a community or a factory or an individual.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Careers / Hoover, J Edgar (1895-1972) / Latin American history / Pulitzer prizes / Writing