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Aside from the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey's book club, the Pulitzer Prize is among the most coveted awards in American publishing.

And when the awards were announced on Monday, Alfred A. Knopf emerged with three of the five book prizes, with its authors winning in the fiction, general nonfiction and history categories. Cormac McCarthy won for ''The Road''; Lawrence Wright won for ''The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11''; and Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff won for ''The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.''

This is the fourth time that Knopf has achieved a Pulitzer trifecta. It last did so in 1996, when Richard Ford was awarded the fiction prize for ''Independence Day''; Alan Taylor won the history medal for ''William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic''; and Jack Miles took the biography prize for ''God: A Biography.''

Knopf's authors also won three Pulitzers in 1988 and 1991. All told, Knopf authors have won 58 Pulitzers, the publisher said. (A sister imprint of Knopf, Doubleday, won a fourth prize this year for the parent company, Random House, with ''The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher,'' by Debby Applegate.)

''Every time it happens you're absolutely delighted,'' said Sonny Mehta, Knopf's editor in chief, who learned of the prizes while sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport near London on Monday. ''It's a bit like childbirth. It always feels great after it's done.''

Knopf is not the only publishing house to have three winning titles in a single year. Little, Brown won three Pulitzers in 1938 and 1973, and in 1999 Farrar, Straus & Giroux also won three.

Mr. Mehta said he was particularly happy for Mr. McCarthy, 73, who, as it happens, was chosen by Ms. Winfrey's book club last month for ''The Road.''

''It certainly appears to be his year, period,'' Mr. Mehta said.

''The Road'' is Mr. McCarthy's most successful book since ''All the Pretty Horses,'' which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 and has sold about 1.2 million copies in paperback, according to Knopf. The novel was made into a movie starring Matt Damon and Pen?pe Cruz in 2000. Mr. McCarthy's ''No Country for Old Men'' has been adapted into a movie directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, which is to be released later this year.

A Pulitzer Prize can certainly give a boost to sales. Last year, after Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin won the biography award for ''American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer,'' also published by Knopf, the book doubled its sales, said Paul Bogaards, a Knopf spokesman.

The prize can be particularly helpful to fiction winners. When ''March,'' a novel by Geraldine Brooks and published by Viking Books, won a Pulitzer last year, it surprised some in the industry because the author was relatively unknown. But after it won, the book, which had sold about 23,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales in retail and online outlets, went on to sell 208,000 copies in paperback.

''The Road'' is already a best seller. It spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and will be No. 1 on the paperback fiction best-seller list this Sunday. The publisher said that it had 950,000 paperback copies of the book in print. According to BookScan, it has sold 116,000 paperback copies and 142,000 in hardcover.

''The Looming Tower'' was also a best seller, spending eight weeks on the Times nonfiction hardcover list. Mr. Bogaards said the publisher yesterday ordered a print run of another 20,000 copies, taking the total number in print to 198,000 copies. The publisher is also printing an additional 8,500 copies of ''The Race Beat.''

Winning the Pulitzer doesn't necessarily add up to big sales, of course. Take the case of ''Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya,'' by Caroline Elkins. That book, published by Henry Holt & Company, won the general nonfiction prize last year. But according to BookScan, it sold only 4,000 copies in hardcover and 6,000 in paperback.
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