CAMDEN – Richard Russo was not near a radio or telephone Monday afternoon when the 2002 Pulitzer Prizes were announced in New York.

When he arrived at his Camden home nearly an hour after the committee released the names of winners, his wife, Barbara, met him on the porch with tears in her eyes.

She was the first to tell her husband that his novel “Empire Falls,” which is set in Maine, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

“We had a good hug and shared a little tear. It’s all been downhill from there,” said Russo ebulliently.

It’s likely he meant that his heart had not stopped racing with excitement. But actually he was talking about the phone, which had been ringing wildly since the news broke earlier in the day. No sooner was one congratulatory call finished when another call came.

Paul Newman, who starred in the screen adaptation of Russo’s “Nobody’s Fool” and is producing the film version of “Empire Falls,” had called. CBS was on the call-back list. Before the day was over, Russo undoubtedly would be talking with his two daughters, neighbors, journalists, publishers and admirers.

“I’m thrilled that somebody who lives in my town and is such a wonderful writer won it,” said Tess Gerritsen, a novelist who also lives in Camden. “It is well-deserved. I thought it was a magnificent book. It’s set in Maine, but it’s deeper than that. It is a book about humanity itself.”

“Empire Falls” was not nominated for two other American literary prizes: the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. So he didn’t think he had an easy shot at the Pulitzer, which comes with prestige and a $7,500 prize.

“We all have arrogant fantasies,” he said. “But I didn’t dream too seriously of this. I was hoping to be short-listed. I was going to be very happy today to find out I was one of the finalists.”

Indeed, Russo’s story of a declining mill town in Maine beat Jonathan Franzen’s trendy and urbane novel, “The Corrections,” which has received a deluge of critical attention and publicity, including a rebuff from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” after Franzen balked at accepting her endorsement.

Book critic Janet Maslin wrote last year in The New York Times that “Empire Falls” is about “the price of reconciling dreams with disappointment, and the many unexpected ways of finding salvation.” She also called the book a “cause for celebration.”

It will be easy for Maine to celebrate yet another resident writer whose work has focused attention on the rich literary tradition of the New England region.

“I hope it’s good for the state,” said Russo, who has written five books. “I write so much about class, and people confuse that with writing about place. This is a book about class and it happens to be set in Maine. As many people have pointed out, it could have been set in many places. This is a snapshot of Maine but it’s also a snapshot of America at the end of the millennium.”

Russo, a native of Gloversville, N.Y., moved to Maine a decade ago to teach English at Colby College in Waterville. He quit academia when the success of the film “Nobody’s Fool,” for which he co-wrote the screenplay, allowed him to pursue writing full time. In addition to writing the screenplay for “Empire Falls,” Russo currently is working on another novel.