Middlesex is Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Published in 2002, Middlesex is narrated by Cal Stephanides, an intersex narrator who recounts the history of a Greek American family and the biological inheritance that shapes Cal’s development. The story spans generations and continents, moving from Asia Minor and Greece to Detroit and suburban Michigan.
The novel combines family saga, migration history, coming-of-age fiction, and reflections on gender and identity. Its title refers both to a street in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and to the narrator’s experience of existing outside simple binary categories. The family’s history is also connected to major events such as the Greco-Turkish War and the Detroit race riot of 1967.
Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was not the Pulitzer winner. The later book The Marriage Plot also received major attention, but Middlesex is the novel that earned the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.