Win a Pulitzer Prize, it is often said, and the first line of your obituary is written. Win more than one, especially in the drama category, and the focus becomes less on how the world will talk about you and more on how you’ll talk about the world.
Only seven playwrights have received multiple Pulitzers, and, with the exception of the tight-lipped Edward Albee, each has rebranded himself as a playwright/pontificator. Exactly one statement from one of them has achieved any level of cultural notoriety—“Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” courtesy of George S. Kaufman—but that didn’t stop the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Thornton Wilder from routinely stepping out of the rehearsal room and onto the bully pulpit. One of them, Robert E. Sherwood, even managed to parlay his newfound career into a speechwriting gig for Franklin Roosevelt. (Sherwood did coin the phrase “arsenal of democracy” in one of those speeches. But he’s in a slightly different category, as he was actually asked to do that sort of thing.)
The most obvious example in recent years of this declamatory tendency is August Wilson, who died in 2005 just after the completion of his astounding ten-play chronicle of twentieth-century black America. The obits still led with the pair of Pulitzers, but shortly thereafter came the accounts of his crusades on behalf of the African-American cultural community. These strictures about what black theater artists ought and ought not do were so controversial (and so well publicized)
