“Purpose,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that was commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Pulitzer board announced Monday.
The fictional work debuted in Chicago in 2024 and moved earlier this year from Steppenwolf to Broadway, where it currently plays with most of its original Chicago cast. Directed in New York and Chicago by Phylicia Rashad, it’s loosely based on the family of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
This marks the first time a play first seen at Steppenwolf has won the prestigious prize since Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County” in 2008.
In a joint statement to the Tribune, Steppenwolf artistic directors Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis said that the “Purpose” win “underscores our company’s time-honored commitment to developing ensemble-driven, new works.” The play was also nominated for a Tony Award last week, along with several members of its cast.
The 2025 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes, presented annually by Columbia University, include nine winners across eight arts categories for books, drama and music. Awards for journalism were also announced Monday.
“James,” by the novelist Percival Everett, won for fiction.
The book, which previously won the Kirkus Prize and a National Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, used Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as its starting point, reworking the story from the perspective of Jim, now James, Twain’s escaped slave. It was a risky kind of bestseller from a longtime author and professor of English at the University of Southern California, whose previous breakthrough 2001 novel “Erasure” was later adapted as the Oscar-nominated movie “American Fiction.” Critics felt Everett more than lived up to his source, both honoring Twain and deepening the 1885 original.
Everett told the Tribune last year, “I think people assume because I am revisiting Twain, I am correcting. I love Twain’s novel. It doesn’t arise from dissatisfaction. if anything, I am flattering myself thinking I am in conversation with Twain.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Tribune writer Christopher Borrelli contributed to this report.
2025 Pulitzer Prize winners in the arts
FICTION: “James” by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
DRAMA: “Purpose” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
HISTORY:
- “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War” by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press)
- “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” by Kathleen DuVal (Random House)
BIOGRAPHY: “John Lewis: A Life” by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
MEMOIR: “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls (MCD)
POETRY: “New and Selected Poems” by Marie Howe (W.W. Norton & Company)
GENERAL NONFICTION: “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement” by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press)
MUSIC: “Sky Islands” by Susie Ibarra
