The Way We Live Now

THE AMERICAN DREAM AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE. So it seemed fitting that literary explorations of the tattered myths that once bound this country together led the pack for this year's Pulitzer Prizes.

Novelist Jane Smiley won the fiction award for A Thousand Acres, a heartrending Americanization of King Lear in which a prosperous Iowa farmer divides his land among three daughters. Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet by Lewis B. Puller Jr. was cited in the biography category. Puller, whose late father "Chesty" was America's most decorated Marine, lost both his legs while serving as a lieutenant in Vietnam. The son's memoir provides unsparing commentary on how the nation has survived the agonies and complexities of that bitter conflict.

The nonfiction award went to The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, energy specialist Daniel Yergin's best-selling history of oil and how it has misshaped culture in the U.S., from fast food to foreign policy. The Pulitzer Board also voted a special award to Art Spiegelman, editor of the avant-garde graphic magazine Raw, for his unusual Maus tales, an autobiographical chronicle in comic-book form about the Holocaust, its survivors and their children in which Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats.

The biggest surprise came when the award for drama was announced: The Kentucky Cycle, a six-hour historical saga by the relatively unknown playwright Robert Schenkkan -- and the first play to win a Pulitzer without ever having been produced in New York City. His epic, which spans 200 years of American history as experienced by three eastern Kentucky families, premiered in Seattle last June and completed a six-week run in Los Angeles last month.

Disturbed by the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S., Schenkkan, who grew up in Texas and lives in California, wrote the first of the nine plays that make up the Cycle in 1984, following a visit to Kentucky. "Society falls apart when the underlying myth no longer functions," he says, paraphrasing Joseph Campbell. "Now there's a quest for a new mythology, and I'd like to think this play is part of that search."