Doctorow Wins PEN/Faulkner Award

E.L. Doctorow has won his second PEN/Faulkner fiction award, for The March, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced today. Doctorow previously won the award in 1990, for Billy Bathgate.

The March is set during Sherman's Civil War march through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864?65. The author said he got the idea for the novel 20 years ago after reading historian Joseph Glatthaar's account of the march, told from a soldier's point-of-view.

"I think it's his best so far," said George Garrett, novelist, poet and judges for the award, the Washington Post reported. It is "a hell of a good evocation of history." Other judges for the award were novelists and short-story writer Ana Menendez and fiction writer and Arizona State University Professor Melissa Pritchard. Doctorow will receive the $15,000 award at a ceremony on May 6 in Washington, D.C.

The four other finalists, who will each receive $5,000, were William Henry Lewis, for I Got Somebody in Staunton; Karen Fisher, for A Sudden Country; Bruce Wagner, for The Chrysanthemum Palace; and James Salter, for Last Night.