A Timeline of Pulitzer Prize-Winning Shows

Let’s start our journey right at the beginning, and travel back to 1918. Jesse Lynch Williams was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Why Marry? This satirical exploration of marriage and divorce captured the social and moral issues of its time, setting a precedent for how the Pulitzer would recognize plays that reflected the realities of American life.

In the 1920s, Eugene O’Neill received the award three times for his plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928). He was known as the ‘father of American theater’ because he was hugely influential in transforming the art from light comedy and entertainment, to serious drama with emotional and psychological depth. Broadway audiences were no longer guaranteed to leave the theater smiling, but rather in thought, as the darker realities of American life were shown on stage. 

The Great Depression gripped the nation in the 1930s and the winning plays reflected the anxieties and social changes occurring right across the country. In 1932, a musical was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the first time. Of Thee I Sing is a sharp political satire by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin that mocked bureaucracy, elections, and the presidency. The themes mirrored the public’s disillusionment with President Hoover’s administration during the challenging economic times. 

By the late 1930s, American drama had entered its Golden Age. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) captured the beauty and fragility of everyday life, and remains a fixture on school curricula and regional stages across the country. In 2024, a major Broadway revival opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Jim Parsons and Zoey Deutch.

The next two decades brought a string of Broadway classics. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) tapped into the anxieties of post-war America, while Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s South Pacific (1950) became only the second musical to receive the award, praised for its progressive exploration of racial prejudice. Williams returned to Broadway in 1955 with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which probed taboo themes of sexuality, repression and death in the South. In 1957, nearly three decades after his third Pulitzer, Eugene O’Neill won a fourth for Long Day’s Journey into Night, making him the most awarded playwright in Pulitzer history—a record he still holds.

It was during this period that the Pulitzer’s prestige grew, aided by the launch of the Tony Awards in 1947, which raised Broadway to a new level of mass, commercial appeal. Many Pulitzer winners from this era enjoyed successful Broadway runs when they first premiered, and they are amongst the most regularly revived plays ever written. Major revivals often entice A-list actors to take on iconic roles, such as Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, Scarlett Johansson as Cat, and Jessica Lange as Mary Tyrone. 

The 1960s and 70s saw huge social transformation in the United States, from the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements, to protests against the Vietnam War and riots over LGBT rights. The Pulitzer Prize winners of this era reflected the changing times, with many playwrights pushing the boundaries of both form and content.

Two musicals won the Pulitzer in the 1960s. Fiorello! (1960) told the story of a New York City mayor’s fight against political corruption, with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott. Whilst, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1962) by Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert, lampooned corporate America.

In 1969, Charles Gordone became the first African American winner with No Place to Be Somebody, a powerful story of racial conflict and identity in Civil Rights-era New York City. It was also the first Off-Broadway winner, validating experimental work staged beyond the profit-driven theaters of Broadway.

Other key winners included Jason Miller’s The Championship Season (1973), exploring moral decay and toxic masculinity after Vietnam, and A Chorus Line (1976) by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, which celebrated self-expression while exposing the perils of show business. The musical was a runaway success, winning 12 Tony Awards and becoming Broadway’s longest-running production until Cats in 1997.

Towards the end of the century, the experimentation of the 60s and 70s had become the new normal. Voices that had long been ignored – female writers, black playwrights and LGBT artists – were more widely recognized by the Pulitzer juries. In the 1980s, three women broke a two-decade streak of male winners. Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (1981), Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother (1983) and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989) brought authentic women’s voices to Broadway. 

David Mamet’s scathing probe into capitalism, masculinity and morality, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), has become a regular fixture on Broadway, most recently at the Palace Theatre in 2025, starring Kieran Culkin. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1985) celebrated artistic creation, inspired by French pointillist painter Georges Seurat. In 1987, August Wilson received his first Pulitzer for Fences, part of his American Century Cycle exploring the African American experience in each decade of the 20th century. Wilson earned six nominations in his lifetime—the most of any playwright—and won again for The Piano Lesson (1990).

Two seismic works about the queer experience and the AIDS crisis defined the 1990s: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1993) and Jonathan Larson’s rock musical RENT (1996). Both shows garnered critical acclaim at the time and have become hugely influential in their respective genres.

In the 2000s, playwrights began to look outward, tackling war, globalization, race, and gender with renewed urgency. The Pulitzer juries increasingly recognized diversity of voice and regional theater innovation over Broadway prestige. Notably, only one play from this era premiered on Broadway, with most debuting Off-Broadway or in regional theaters across the country.

Suzan-Lori Parks made history in 2002 as the first Black woman to win the Drama Pulitzer, for Topdog/Underdog, a biting study of brotherhood and racial identity. While Tracy Letts’ tragicomedy August: Osage County (2008) captured mid-2000s American anxieties through its stark exploration of mental illness, addiction, and family dysfunction. It won the Pulitzer, five Tony Awards, and inspired a major film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

Lynn Nottage made Pulitzer history as the only woman to win twice. Ruined (2009) drew from her encounters with women affected by the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Sweat (2017) was hailed by The New Yorker as “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era.”

In 2016, Hamilton won the Pulitzer in one of the most high-profile wins in the Prize’s history. Lin Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of the story of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton became a cultural phenomenon, redefining who gets to tell America’s story. The musical has broken multiple records at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre and grossed over $1 billion in ticket sales. 

In the 2020s, all five recipients of the prize have been writers of color, with women making up more than half of the list of winners so far. This makes it the most diverse and inclusive period in the Pulitzer’s history. 

Michael R Jackson’s A Strange Loop (2020) is a self-referential exploration of race, sexuality, and identity through the story of a Black, gay playwright confronting his own inner voice. Meanwhile, James Ijames’ Fat Ham (2022) impressed the jury with its inventive reimagining of Hamlet set at a Southern barbecue and told through the lens of the modern, queer, Black experience. In 2025, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose, a dysfunctional family drama exploring Black ambition and identity, took home both the Pulitzer and the Tony Award for Best Play. 

It’s clear that for much of its history, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama told only part of the American story. The winners were mostly found on Broadway and that meant they were largely white, male, and middle class, while groundbreaking work by women, Black writers, and other underrepresented voices thrived elsewhere, mostly unseen by the Pulitzer jury. In the 21st century, however, the landscape has shifted dramatically: of the 20 women who have won the Prize since 1918, nearly half did so in the past 25 years, and of the 10 Black playwrights honored, five have received the award since 2019. And yet, the work isn’t done with Latino playwrights and artists from other underrepresented backgrounds still too often overlooked.

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is more than just a trophy. It cements a play's legacy in the American theater canon and helps to shape the future of the art by inspiring the next generation of playwrights. A student studying one of the winning plays at school today could be one of the Prize’s future recipients, continuing the great legacy of this prestigious award.