Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 13, 1994 TAG: 9404130123
SECTION: NATIONAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``I was at the gym, stark naked, getting into my gym clothes, when a friend who knew what gym I worked out at called me,'' the 66-year-old Albee said in a phone interview from Houston, where he has taught drama workshops at the University of Houston for the past five years.
``I suppose that's a good way to get a prize.''
In winning his third Pulitzer, Albee overcame a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition.
Best known for ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'', Albee won Pulitzers in 1967 for ``A Delicate Balance'' and in 1975 for ``Seascape.''
``Three Tall Women,'' which reopened Tuesday night off-Broadway, grew out of Albee's attempt to come to terms with his adoptive mother, socialite Frances Albee.
``I guess you could say it was an exorcising of demons,'' Albee said.
In other arts categories, the poetry prize went to Yusef Komunyakaa, an English professor at Indiana University, for ``Neon Vernacular''; the fiction prize went to E. Annie Proulx for her novel ``The Shipping News.''
``I was very surprised, but in a sense, it sort of tells me that I'm going in the right direction in my work,'' Komunyakaa said.
``I'm bowled over. It's too much. It's like frosting on a layer cake whose layers can't be counted,'' Proulx said in a phone interview from her Vershire, Vt., home.
Proulx, pronounced PREW, earlier won the National Book Award for ``The Shipping News,'' the tale of a third-rate newspaper reporter who moves to Newfoundland with his family and embarks on a journey of self discovery.
In the other arts categories, the winner for general nonfiction was ``Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,'' by David Remnick, a former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post.
David Levering Lewis won the biography prize for ``W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919.'' The music award was won by Gunther Schuller for his ``Of Reminiscences and Reflections.'' No history award was given.
In the journalism categories, The New York Times claimed prizes in feature photography, spot news and feature writing to boost its total to 69 - more than any other news organization.
It marked the first time the Times has won a Pulitzer for photography. The winning entry was a photo by free-lancer Kevin Carter of a vulture hovering over a starving Sudanese girl.
The Times also was honored for its spot news reporting on the World Trade Center bombing, and the feature writing award went to Isabel Wilkerson for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side and two stories on the Midwestern floods.
``It's a special thrill to win for a foreign photo, brilliant national feature writing and hard-hitting local news,'' said retiring Executive Editor Max Frankel.
The Chicago Tribune won two prizes: for R. Bruce Dold's editorials about flaws in the Illinois child-welfare system and for an explanatory series by science writer Ronald Kotulak about the mysteries of the brain.
The national reporting prize went to Eileen Welsome of The Albuquerque (N.M.) Tribune for her stories about Americans unwittingly used in government plutonium experiments a half-century ago.
A team of journalists from The Dallas Morning News won the international reporting prize - the paper's sixth Pulitzer - for its series examining violence against women around the world.
by CNB