Which 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was written by Alison Lurie?

Foreign Affairs was the 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Alison Lurie.

Published in 1984, the novel follows American academics traveling and working in England. Its central characters, Vinnie Miner and Fred Turner, experience romantic and cultural complications that expose differences between academic habits, national identities, and personal expectations.

Lurie’s novel is known for its sharp, comic treatment of manners and relationships. The foreign setting is important because the characters’ distance from the United States makes familiar assumptions appear newly strange.

Readers can confuse Foreign Affairs with other Pulitzer-winning novels from the 1980s, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Those books won in different years and were written by different authors. Lurie later wrote several other novels and children’s books, but Foreign Affairs remains her Pulitzer-recognized work.