Pulitzer Prize for history goes to early American scholar
By Lisa Crumrine Klionsky
In the early afternoon of April 9, UC Davis history professor Alan Taylor
found himself digesting something more than lunch after playing tennis:
the news that he'd won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for history. The announcement
launched a flurry of phone calls, interviews and an impromptu press conference.
Taylor won the prestigious prize, which includes a $3,000 cash award, for
his 1995 book, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier
of the Early American Republic. Columbia University awards the Pulitzer
Prizes in journalism and in arts annually.
The prize came just two weeks after Taylor received a 1996 Bancroft Prize
in American history for the same book.
Taylor, who says he knew he'd been nominated for the Pulitzer, said he
is delighted about the Pulitzer Prize because "it reflects so well
upon my department, the university and Jane Garrett, my editor at Alfred
Knopf. They supported the book although it may have seemed an idiosyncratic
project," Taylor says.
His book chronicles the life of the founder of Cooperstown, N.Y., and the
father of the 19th-century American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. William
Cooper advanced his fortunes after the
Revolutionary War by gaining control of large tracts of land and subdividing
them, and improved his prospects in life through a program of self-education
and political aspiration.
The book is somewhat unusual for a scholarly history book in the way that
it weaves back and forth between the three themes, Taylor says. It is a
biography of William Cooper, a community study of Cooperstown, N.Y., and
literary criticism of James Fenimore Cooper's novel, The Pioneers, a book
based on the life of the Cooper family in frontier Cooperstown.
"I wrote it as an attempt to reach a broader audience in addition
to my fellow scholars," Taylor says. He has received letters from people
outside of academia who've enjoyed the book as a "good read."
Taylor, 40, has been a professor at UC Davis since 1994, specializing in
early American history and the history of the American West. Previously
he taught at Boston University, the College of William and Mary and Colby
College. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at William and Mary
and received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society,
the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library.
He is a graduate of Colby College and Brandeis University, where he received
his Ph.D. in American history in 1986. He is also the author of Liberty
Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier,
1760-1820. His William Cooper's Town received the 1995 New York State Historical
Association Manuscript Award.
