Jayne Anne Phillips’ novel ‘Night Watch,’ Eboni Booth’s drama ‘Primary Trust’ among Pulitzer winners

BY HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Stories of race, slavery and the Civil War, real and invented, were winners this year for the Pulitzer Prizes.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ “Night Watch,” a mother-daughter saga set in a West Virginia asylum right after the war, was cited for fiction. Jacqueline Jones received the history prize for “No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era” and Ilyon Woo’s “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom” won in biography.

Phillips, a West Virginia native who often sets her books in her home state, sees “Night Watch” as the third of a trilogy of novels about war, following the Vietnam-era narrative “Machine Dreams” and the Korean War story “Lark & Termite,” which draws in part on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press investigation into the No Gun Ri massacre.

She began “Night