ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 1996 TAG: 9604100061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
Jonathan Larson, who died hours after the final dress rehearsal of ``Rent,'' won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama Tuesday for his Broadway-bound rock musical that celebrates the bohemians of New York's East Village.
``Jonathan would have been so proud,'' the playwright's father, Allan Larson, said from Albuquerque, N.M.
The 35-year-old Larson - believed to be the first person to win the drama award posthumously - was found dead in his apartment Jan. 25 of an aortic aneurysm.
The Pulitzer for fiction was awarded to Richard Ford for ``Independence Day,'' a sequel to his acclaimed 1986 novel, ``The Sportswriter.''
George Walker won the Pulitzer for music, for his composition ``Lilacs.'' He is the first black composer to win since the music prize was first awarded in 1943.
``I'm absolutely delighted,'' the 73-year-old Walker said from his home in Montclair, N.J. ``I'm particularly pleased that I won this for `Lilacs.'''
``Lilacs,'' is a work for voice and orchestra set to four stanzas of the Walt Whitman poem ``When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.''
``William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic'' by Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, won for history.
``The Dream of the Unified Field'' by Jorie Graham won for poetry.
For biography, the winner was ``God: A Biography'' by Jack Miles, a former Jesuit who is now a book columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
The general nonfiction award went to ``The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism'' by Tina Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
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