Drama: The drama recipient, John Patrick Shanley, 54, said in a phone call from New York, "I'm happy and feeling affirmed." "Doubt" is his first play to open on Broadway, and he attended the opening with his Catholic school first-grade teacher, Sister James. He used her name in the play for the character of an eighth-grade teacher whose loyalties are divided between the school principal and a priest suspected of molesting a student.

"Doubt," said Shanley, is not based on a particular incident in his own schooling. The play's subtitle is "A Parable," and he noted that parables "explore ideas through telling a story that's most often apocryphal." When he was a child attending church, he said, the parable "was always my favorite part of the sermon. I'm a story guy."

Fiction: Religious faith also infuses the fiction winner. "Gilead" is framed as a letter from an ailing, elderly preacher seeking to explain his life to his young son. The novel, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, won a National Book Critics Circle award in March.

Robinson, 61, reached at her home in Iowa City, Iowa, where she teaches, called her book a "quiet" novel with literary allusions and theological references. Its critical success, she said, sends a strong message to fellow literary writers about reading appetites in a country seemingly dominated by mass-market tastes.

"People have an assumption that you can't write that kind of book and have readers," she said. "I wrote it because it was on my mind, but I think I discovered for myself and for the sake of other people that you can write books like that and people do indeed read them."

Nonfiction: Journalist Steve Coll, 46, won the nonfiction award for his dissection of the CIA's quarter-century involvement in Afghanistan, beginning with the 1979 Soviet invasion. Coll, an associate editor for The Washington Post, is a former managing editor and South Asia correspondent for the paper.

"I had worked on the subject matter and had carried around the files and interviews, thinking about possibly a book," Coll said from his office in Washington. A few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, "I went home and went digging in the garage to see if I still had this material. It wasn't a book ... but it helped me understand what the shape of the narrative should be."

The result was the 720-page "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," published by Penguin Press.

Biography: Biography winners Mark Stevens, New York magazine's art critic, and Annalyn Swan, a freelance writer and editor, are husband and wife. Their book was published by Random House.

Swan said the two, both 53, were able to detail their work with the memories of people who had known painter Willem de Kooning during his 92 years, including his first American girlfriend after he immigrated to the United States from Holland in 1926.

"We were extremely lucky — we caught the last of the old guard and were able to find people who knew de Kooning back to the 1920s," she said.

"The only reason it took so long," Stevens said, "is because I am deeply lazy."

History: The Pulitzer for history went to Brandeis University professor David Hackett Fischer, 69, whose "Washington's Crossing" was also a finalist for a National Book Award. The book looks at Gen. George Washington's famous trip across the Delaware River as a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

Poetry: U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser, 65, a retired insurance man from Lincoln, Neb., won the poetry Pulitzer for his collection "Delights and Shadows," which draws small epiphanies from elements of everyday life.

"I can't even get my mind around this," Kooser said from his farmhouse near Garland, 20 miles northwest of Lincoln. "I had cancer six years ago, and at that time I wasn't sure I'd be alive in even a year. Now after all that's happened, it's really wonderful."

Music: Steven Stucky, the music winner, teaches at Cornell University. He began his relationship with the L.A. Philharmonic in 1988, as composer in residence. He is now consulting composer for new music.

Winners in the Letters and Drama category each receive $10,000.