WASHINGTON, April 7 — Gene Weingarten, whose humor column, Below the Beltway, is syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, has won the 2008 Pulitzer for Feature Writing.

Weingarten's winning story, "Pearls Before Breakfast," is about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell -- whose performances "can command $1,000 a minute" -- busking at a Washington Metro station at rush hour. Weingarten conceived the idea as a test to see whether, "in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius." The day after the story appeared in the April 7, 2007, Washington Post magazine, Weingarten said (in a chat on washingtonpost.com), "This story got the largest and most global response of anything I have ever written, for any publication."

"While this award is technically not for my columns but for my feature writing," Weingarten commented, "I consider it an endorsement of the excellence of absolutely everything I do: Humor writing, parallel parking, lovemaking, etc. So in that regard, using the same bold, broad-brush logic, I think all the clients of my column have a right to claim that they, too, won the Pulitzer Prize today."