New York ? “March,” Geraldine Brooks’ novel that imagines the life of the fictional father in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday.

For the first time since 1997, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for drama.

Brooks depicted the life of John March, the father absent for most of Alcott’s famed 1868 novel of four sisters growing up in Massachusetts during the Civil War.

Brooks beat finalists including E.L. Doctorow, whose “The March,” the fictionalized account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s brutal conquest of the South during the Civil War, had won the National Book Critics Circle Prize.

The prize for general nonfiction went to Caroline Elkins for “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.” David M. Oshinsky was awarded the history prize for “Polio: An American Story.”

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin took the prize for biography for “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” about the American physicist and atomic pioneer.

The prize for poetry went to Claudia Emerson for “Late Wife.” Yehudi Wyner took the music prize for “Piano Concerto: ‘Chiavi in Mano.”‘

The Pulitzer board had listed three finalists for drama: “Red Light Winter,” Adam Rapp’s play about two good friends and their relationships with a young prostitute they pick up in Amsterdam; “Miss Witherspoon,” Christopher Durang’s surreal fantasy about a perpetually suicidal woman who keeps coming back from the dead; and “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” Rolin Jones’ comedy about a bright yet eccentric young woman who builds a humanlike robot.

Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said there was no clear-cut drama winner among the scores of entries and several times the board has declined to award a prize in a category.