On the afternoon of April 16, Michael Chabon, 37, dashed into his Berkeley, Calif., house to learn he'd won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction. ''I was in my office out in back when I heard this bloodcurdling scream,'' he says, dazedly, 90 minutes after getting the news. ''My wife is eight months pregnant, so I ran in, and it was the Associated Press on the phone.'' Chabon scored the award for ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'' (Random House, $26.95), a 600 plus page leap through the lives of two comic book artists that glimmers with the same precision of style as Chabon's earlier novels, ''The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'' (1988) and ''Wonder Boys'' (1995).
Chabon (pronounced, he's said, ''Shea as in Stadium, Bon as in Jovi'') has just finished a draft of a ''Kavalier & Clay'' screenplay for producer Scott Rudin, and he's working on a children's novel titled ''Summerland.'' And at the moment, he's getting ready for his close up. Or, rather, not getting ready. ''I'm having my picture taken right now,'' he says. ''This is very strange.''
There's another AP photographer at David Auburn's place in Williamstown, Mass. He's early. ''You know, I was gonna take a shower,'' the playwright tells him. Auburn, 31, won his Pulitzer for ''Proof'' (Faber & Faber, $12), a drama currently on Broadway with Mary-Louise Parker in the lead role of a gloomy young math genius.
After a peripatetic apprenticeship (comedy sketches in Chicago, a screenwriting fellowship in L.A., the playwriting program at Juilliard), Auburn hit on the concepts for his first major production in 1999: ''One idea was to write about two sisters fighting about something that had been left behind after their parents' death. The other was about someone worried that they were going to inherit a parent's mental illness. Looking for a way to put them together, I came up with the mathematical background.'' Now he wants to adapt ''Proof'' for the movies. But first he wants to bathe.
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