Pride and Pleasure Won the 2026 Pulitzer for Biography by Bringing the Schuyler Sisters Out of Hamilton's Shadow

You probably know the Schuyler sisters from a Broadway stage, three young women in bright gowns singing about revolution in the streets of New York. Amanda Vaill's Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution gives two of them the life the musical had no time for. Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler grew up in one of the richest families in the Hudson Valley, lived through a war that remade their world and loved men who made history. This book is about them.

The book won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The jury called it 'a lively and detailed biography' of two daughters of wealthy and influential Dutch landowners who coloured American history. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it, and before the Pulitzer it was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography.

Two sisters, two very different lives

Angelica, the elder, eloped with a man who had made his fortune supplying the war. She went on to move through the salons of Europe, where her circle took in Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the Prince of Wales. Elizabeth, known as Eliza, married Alexander Hamilton. She backed his career at every step, then faced the public scandals and private betrayals that followed him, including his attraction to her own sister.

Vaill sets the two side by side and lets you watch their choices pull them apart and draw them back together. Neither sister is a saint. Vaill herself admits that Angelica surprised her: 'The surprise to me was that Angelica, for all her charm and cleverness, turned out to be a somewhat shallow woman.' That candour is one of the pleasures of the book. You get two real women, with all their pride, rather than two portraits on a wall.

Present tense for the sisters, past tense for the war

The Pulitzer jury singled out one unusual choice. Vaill tells the sisters' story in the present tense and the sweep of the American Revolution in the past tense. The effect is striking. Angelica and Eliza feel alive on the page, making decisions in the moment without knowing how things will end, while the great events of the war move around them like history already written.

It also makes the book read more like a novel than a reference work. Battles, treaties and elections stay in the background, where the sisters would have experienced them: in letters, in rumours and at the dinner table. If you came to the Schuylers through the musical, you will find the family drama you wanted, set inside a far richer world.

A biography that began in a theatre seat

Vaill came to the sisters by chance. She was researching a different book when she saw the musical in its first, off-Broadway run, and the experience stayed with her. 'I remember thinking someone should look into these women's lives,' she said. 'I had no idea I'd be that someone.' Watching that production, she said, she realised she had been in love with these women all along.

What followed was deep archival research, through the letters and papers that let Vaill rebuild the sisters' daily lives. She is a biographer, journalist and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, and that last skill shows in the way she builds scenes. The research never sits on the page as a list of facts. It becomes rooms, conversations and choices.

Women have won five of the last six biography prizes

The very first Pulitzer for biography, in 1917, went to two sisters, Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, for a life of their mother, Julia Ward Howe. After that, women largely disappeared from the list. Across the prize's history, women have written or co-written 19 of the 111 winning books, roughly one in six, and no woman won at all between 1959 and 1985.

The last six years tell a different story. Women have written, co-written or shared the prize in five of them: Tamara Payne in 2021, Erin I. Kelly in 2022, Beverly Gage in 2023, Ilyon Woo in 2024 and now Vaill. This year's jury was chaired by the author Marie Arana and included Jonathan Eig, who shared the prize in 2024. The other finalists were Lance Richardson, with True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, and James McWilliams, with The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford, a study of a little-known poet of the American South.

Last year's winner was also a double portrait of the 18th century

The 2025 prize went to Jason Roberts for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, a double biography of the naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon. Read the two winners back to back and the parallel is hard to miss. Both books follow a pair of 18th-century lives that run side by side and collide, and both use that pairing to show you an age of revolution, in science in one case and in politics in the other.

What stays with you after the last chapter

You finish Pride and Pleasure knowing Angelica and Eliza as people rather than supporting characters. Eliza in particular stays with you: the woman who stood by Hamilton through scandal and loss, and who outlived him by half a century. The next time you hear their names sung on a stage, you will hear the women behind the song.

Read it if you loved the musical and wanted more of the Schuyler sisters, you enjoy history told through family and friendship, or you like biographies that read with the pace of a novel.

Buy the book

• Pride and Pleasure on Waterstones
• Pride and Pleasure on Barnes & Noble

Also in this piece

• True Nature on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble
• The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble
• Every Living Thing on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble

Featured Book

Every Living Thing

The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

by Jason Roberts

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Jason Roberts follows Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, two 18th-century rivals who set out to identify every living thing on Earth, and shows how their opposing views of nature still shape science today.

Waterstones

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Next in the series: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.