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A Rabbit Called Harvey 

It’s been a good run for ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ Boulder and the Pulitzer Prizes: In 2016 professor Carter Pann was a finalist in the music category, just a year after professor Elizabeth Fenn won in history.

As it happens, ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ alumni, faculty and affiliates have been winning Pulitzers — among the most famous prizes in journalism, arts and letters — for at least 71 years.

Among alumni, the tradition appears to have started in 1945, when Denver native Mary Coyle Chase (A&S’26) won the drama prize for Harvey, her comic play about a genial alcoholic, Elwood P. Dowd, and his six-foot-plus rabbit.

Over the decades, at least 15 alumni, faculty and staff — and likely many more — have won or shared Pulitzers, some while at ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥, some later in life. Still others were finalists.

Some individual winners work on campus today: Besides Fenn, for instance, there’s Dave Curtin (Jour’78), the chancellor’s speechwriter, who won the 1990 prize in feature writing while working as a reporter at the ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ Springs Gazette Telegraph (now the Gazette).

Many other Buffs have shared group Pulitzers in journalism, the prize’s biggest category. They include university photographer Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86), for staff breaking-news photography with the Rocky Mountain News in 2000, and Doug Pardue (IntlAf’69) of the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier, which won the 2015 public service prize for a series about the murderous abuse of women in South Carolina.

The selection of Harvey over Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie — now a major theater classic — has raised some critics’ eyebrows in retrospect. But Harvey was the prize jury’s clear favorite at the time, according to Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, author of Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies.

The year 1945 was nearly an annus mirabilis for ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥: Not only did Coyle Chase win in drama, but novelist and story writer Jean Stafford (A&S’36; MA’38) was a finalist, too, in fiction. Stafford would later win the 1970 fiction prize for her Collected Stories.

See a list of ÃÛÌÇÖ±²¥ winners.Ìý

Photo by Henry Koster Film Company