Count of Monte Cristo, The

His favorite was “The Count of Monte Cristo” — the story of a peripatetic man of mystery who was wrongly imprisoned by a corrupt magistrate.

He earned the nickname “the Count” — after the Count of Monte Cristo, the fictional character known for adventure and intrigue, and also because of his skill at tallying delegate votes at political conventions.

Though he is not particularly bookish, Mr. Kushner is an admirer of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the story of an innocent man seeking vengeance against people who have wronged him.

The biography award went to Tom Reiss's The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, the story of Alexandre Dumas's father, the non-fiction Pulitzer to Gilbert King's chronicle of racial injustice Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, and the history prize to Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall.

Working alone, Mr. Ferguson wrote scores for more than 60 television movies, including a series of adaptations of classic literature produced by Norman Rosemont, among them “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Man in the Iron Mask, “Les Misérables” and “Camille,” for which Mr. Ferguson won an Emmy in 1985.