Which novel by Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006? The answer is March.
Published in 2005, March reimagines the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Brooks gives John March a life shaped by the American Civil War, abolitionist convictions, military service, and the moral compromises of trying to act humanely within a slaveholding society. The novel shifts attention away from the March daughters and toward the war that separates their family.
March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Brooks drew on the limited information about Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, and transformed that historical inspiration into a fully developed fictional narrative. The book is therefore a companion or prequel-like work to Little Women, but it is not an official continuation written by Alcott.
Readers often confuse March with Brooks’s other historical novels. Year of Wonders, her 2001 debut, concerns a plague-stricken English village in 1666. People of the Book follows the imagined history of a rare illuminated manuscript, while The Secret Chord, published later, centers on King David. None of those novels won the Pulitzer for Fiction.