Pulitzer Prize for Biography

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. The award honors "a distinguished and appropriately documented biography by an American author." Award winners received $15,000 USD.

From 1917 to 2022, this prize was known as the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and was awarded to a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author or co-authors, published during the preceding calendar year. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year.

Recipients
In its first 97 years to 2013, the Biography Pulitzer was awarded 97 times. Two were given in 1938, and none in 1962.

1980s
Entries from this point on include the finalists listed after the winner for each year.

Repeat winners
Ten people have won the Pulitzer for Biography or Autobiography twice:
 * Burton J. Hendrick, 1923, 1929
 * Allan Nevins, 1933, 1937
 * Marquis James, 1930, 1938
 * Douglas S. Freeman, 1935, 1958
 * Samuel Eliot Morison, 1943, 1960
 * Walter Jackson Bate, 1964, 1978
 * David Herbert Donald, 1961, 1988
 * David Levering Lewis, 1994, 2001
 * David McCullough, 1993, 2002
 * Robert Caro, 1975, 2003

W. A. Swanberg was selected by the Pulitzer board in 1962 and 1973; however, the trustees of Columbia University (then responsible for conferral of the awards) overturned the proposed 1962 prize for Citizen Hearst.