Alfred Nobel and Joseph Pulitzer are better known today for the prizes bearing their names than for the unique contributions each made to history. This review will take us behind the scenes and into the private lives of these extraordinary men.

The contributions of these men to history were made prior to their deaths, contributions which continue to affect citizens of the world today. In addition to providing a biographical sketch of the private lives of these titans, there will be a glimpse into the process of choosing the men and women who are awarded these prestigious prizes every year.

From Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer, A Life, by Denis Brian
Without question, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer lived a notable life. Born in 1847 in Hungary, he traveled to the U.S. as a teenager to fight for pay in the Civil War. He learned English, became a lawyer, got involved in politics and later in journalism. He bought the struggling St. Louis Post-Dispatch, then turned the New York World into a superb daily newspaper by upholding the following fool-proof tenet: "cater to the masses and earn their trust." By the time of his death in 1911, Pulitzer had achieved global fame.

Alfred Nobel, A Biography, by Kenne Fant
Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), the inventor of dynamite and founder of the prestigious prizes, is seen as a secluded misanthrope prone to melancholy and convinced of life's absurdities in this gracefully written biography by Swedish actor/director Fant. Of special interest here are excerpts from the committed bachelor's unpublished letters to his Austrian mistress, a coquettish flower sales clerk named Sofie Hess. Having met her when he was 43 and she 20, Nobel vacillates in the course of their 18-year correspondence between fatherly tenderness, sexual desire and patronizing attempts to remake Sofie into a cultured sophisticate. His lonely life was punctuated by tragedies. His brother Emil, a lab worker, died in an explosion and his unscrupulous French business partner, Paul Barbe, killed himself. But perhaps the greatest tragedy was that this shy pacifistic introvert believed that the creation of weapons of mass annihilation would make wars impossible forever.