Two Pulitzer recipients have Boston connections

Jacqueline Jones, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was announced as the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize today for her No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Amazon link).

The book is what it sounds like: A look at the difficulties faced by Blacks even in one of the centers of the abolition movement (where, let's not forget, a mob once nearly killed William Lloyd Garrison).

Jayne Anne Phillips was the recipient of the Pulitzer for fiction for Night Watch (Amazon link), which is the story of a girl and her mother trying to survive the aftermath of the Civil War in West Virginia. But as the Washington Post reports, she " was just stepping outside of her home in her Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain to tend to flowers on her balcony" when she learned the news.