Archive Collection
Best Books That Never Won a Major Award
1905–2025
Prize committees miss great books all the time. This list collects the finest novels, stories, and works of nonfiction that never won a major literary award, from Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway to The Catcher in the Rye, and tells the story of what beat them.
| Year | Title & Author | Historical Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | The Emperor of Gladness | Penguin Press published The Emperor of Gladness in the United States on May 13, 2025, Vuong's second novel after his 2019 debut On Earth We're… |
| 2025 | Playworld | Alfred A Knopf published Playworld on January 7, 2025, Ross's first novel since Mr Peanut in 2010. It won the 2025 Los Angeles Times Christopher… |
| 2024 | The Ministry of Time | Sceptre published The Ministry of Time in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2024, Bradley's first novel. It won the 2024 Goodreads Choice Award for… |
| 2024 | Intermezzo | Faber and Faber published Intermezzo on September 24, 2024, Rooney's fourth novel. It sold 11,885 copies in Ireland and more than 44,000 in the… |
| 2023 | Yellowface | HarperCollins published Yellowface on May 16, 2023, Kuang's first contemporary novel after the fantasy trilogy that made her name. It won the 2023… |
| 2023 | The Bee Sting | The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and did not win, which is why it sits on this list, though it collected a great deal… |
| 2022 | Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Alfred A Knopf published Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow on July 5, 2022. It won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, chosen by public… |
| 2022 | Lessons in Chemistry | Lessons in Chemistry belongs on this list for a specific reason: it was an enormous commercial and popular success that no major jury prize touched.… |
| 2021 | Project Hail Mary | Ballantine Books published Project Hail Mary on May 4, 2021, Weir's third novel after The Martian and Artemis. It became a finalist for the 2022 Hugo… |
| 2021 | Klara and the Sun | Faber and Faber published Klara and the Sun in the United Kingdom and Alfred A Knopf in the United States on March 2, 2021, Ishiguro's first novel… |
| 2020 | The Vanishing Half | The Vanishing Half was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and it won the… |
| 2020 | Mexican Gothic | Mexican Gothic won the 2021 Locus Award for Best Horror Novel and the 2021 British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, along with Canada's 2021… |
| 2019 | The Silent Patient | The Silent Patient won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery and Thriller, a readers' vote. Kirkus Reviews called it clumsy and contrived, with… |
| 2018 | Normal People | Normal People sits on this list on a technicality that is worth stating plainly, because it did win prizes. It took the Costa Novel Award for 2018,… |
| 2018 | Where the Crawdads Sing | No major literary prize marked Where the Crawdads Sing's publication; its honors have run entirely through readers and retailers rather than juries.… |
| 2018 | Educated | Educated won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, the American Library Association's Alex Award in 2019, and the 2018… |
| 2018 | Circe | Circe was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence the same year, and it won… |
| 2017 | Pachinko | Pachinko was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and runner up for the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction. It was named… |
| 2017 | Little Fires Everywhere | Little Fires Everywhere won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, a readers' vote; no major juried literary prize marked its publication.… |
| 2016 | The Nix | The Nix was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, its award for a best first book, in 2016, and it won the Los… |
| 2016 | A Gentleman in Moscow | A Gentleman in Moscow was a 2016 finalist for the Kirkus Prize in the fiction category, and its audiobook, narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith, won an… |
| 2016 | The Girls | The Girls won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, given to a… |
| 2015 | A Little Life | A Little Life was published in March 2015 and came close to everything without taking any of it. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, was… |
| 2015 | The Girl on the Train | The Girl on the Train won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery and Thriller, a readers' vote, and its audiobook won the 2016 Audie Award for… |
| 2014 | Station Eleven | Station Eleven won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, whose judges praised its focus on the survival of human culture after collapse rather than simply… |
| 2013 | The Ocean at the End of the Lane | The Ocean at the End of the Lane won the 2013 National Book Award in Britain, a public and industry prize for Book of the Year distinct from the… |
| 2013 | Life After Life | Life After Life won the 2013 Costa Novel Award, one of the four category prizes that feed into the overall Costa Book of the Year, and the following… |
| 2012 | NW | NW arrived in 2012 as one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and its prize record fell short of that anticipation. It did not make the Man… |
| 2012 | Gone Girl | Crime fiction's own prizes recognized Gone Girl where the major literary prizes mostly passed it by: it was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best… |
| 2011 | The Martian | The Martian's origin story is its own kind of prize. Weir posted it free online in serial chapters after literary agents passed on it, released it as… |
| 2011 | Ready Player One | No literary prize took up Ready Player One, but science fiction's own prizes recognized it in full. The Libertarian Futurist Society gave it the 2012… |
| 2010 | Room | No award for adult literary fiction was designed with a story like this in mind, yet Room reached deep into that year's prize field anyway. It made… |
| 2010 | Freedom | Freedom won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for fiction and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award in 2011, and was a finalist for the National Book… |
| 2009 | The Help | The Help won the Goodreads Choice Award for best fiction and Exclusive Books' Boeke Prize in 2009, and the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Indies… |
| 2005 | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won Sweden's Glass Key Award for best Scandinavian crime novel in 2006, and Larsson himself won the ITV3 Crime… |
| 2008 | The Hunger Games | The Hunger Games won the 2008 Cybils Award for young adult fantasy and science fiction from a jury of librarians, teachers and bloggers, and a 2009… |
| 2008 | 2666 | The English translation of 2666, by Natasha Wimmer, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2008, five years after Bolano's death,… |
| 2007 | The Reluctant Fundamentalist | The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007, losing to Anne Enright's The Gathering, and for the James Tait Black… |
| 2007 | A Thousand Splendid Suns | A Thousand Splendid Suns was the Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year in Britain in 2008, a readers' book club honor rather than a juried literary… |
| 2005 | The Book Thief | The Book Thief received a Michael L. Printz Honor in 2007, the year the Printz Award itself went to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born… |
| 2006 | The Blind Side | The Blind Side won no major book prize; its recognition came instead from lists and youth reading honors: the New York Times and Washington Post both… |
| 2005 | The Historian | The Historian won the Quill Award for debut author of the year in 2005 and the Book Sense Book of the Year for adult fiction in 2006, honors from… |
| 2005 | Never Let Me Go | Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2005 and for the Arthur C. Clarke… |
| 2004 | The Plot Against America | The Plot Against America won the Society of American Historians' James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction and the Sidewise Award for… |
| 2004 | Cloud Atlas | Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, losing to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and for the Nebula Award for best novel… |
| 2003 | The Time Traveler's Wife | The Time Traveler's Wife was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, losing to China Mieville's Iron Council, and placed third for the… |
| 2003 | The Kite Runner | The Kite Runner won South Africa's Boeke Prize in 2004 and was named a 2004 Alex Award winner by the American Library Association, honoring adult… |
| 2002 | The Lovely Bones | The Lovely Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel in 2002, a genre prize from the Horror Writers Association rather than a general… |
| 2002 | Coraline | Coraline won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella in 2003 and the Bram Stoker Award for best work for young readers in 2002, genre prizes… |
| 2001 | The Shadow of the Wind | The Shadow of the Wind was a finalist for Spain's Fernando Lara Prize before publication, and internationally it won the Barry Award for best first… |
| 2001 | Austerlitz | Austerlitz won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2001 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate… |
| 2000 | The Amber Spyglass | The Amber Spyglass won the children's book category at the Whitbread Awards and then beat the other category winners outright, becoming the first… |
| 2000 | House of Leaves | Pantheon released House of Leaves on March 7, 2000, in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions, an unusual choice for a debut novel that… |
| 1999 | The Perks of Being a Wallflower | MTV Books, an imprint of Pocket Books, published The Perks of Being a Wallflower on February 1, 1999; no literary prize marked its arrival, and… |
| 1999 | Girl with a Pearl Earring | Girl with a Pearl Earring was published in 1999 and became a phenomenon, selling nearly two million copies by 2001 and more than five million by… |
| 1998 | The Poisonwood Bible | HarperFlamingo published The Poisonwood Bible in 1998. It was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award, which… |
| 1998 | About a Boy | Gollancz published About a Boy on May 4, 1998. No major literary prize marked it, though Kirkus Reviews found the same originality and fun that had… |
| 1997 | Underworld | Scribner published Underworld in October 1997. It was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for fiction, losing to Charles Frazier's Cold… |
| 1997 | Into Thin Air | Villard published Into Thin Air in 1997, and it was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, one of the rare mountaineering… |
| 1996 | Infinite Jest | Little, Brown published Infinite Jest on February 1, 1996, one thousand seventy nine pages after Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch cut roughly two… |
| 1996 | Fight Club | W. W. Norton published Fight Club on August 17, 1996, Palahniuk's debut novel, after the producer Laura Ziskin bought film rights for ten thousand… |
| 1995 | High Fidelity | Victor Gollancz published High Fidelity in the United Kingdom on September 16, 1995. No major literary prize marked its arrival, though it won… |
| 1995 | Beach Music | Doubleday published Beach Music in July 1995, and it reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list on commercial strength alone; no major… |
| 1994 | The Alienist | Random House published The Alienist in 1994 after paying Carr a sixty thousand dollar advance; Bantam then paid just over one million dollars at… |
| 1994 | Insomnia | Viking published Insomnia in 1994, seven hundred eighty seven pages, longer than any King novel before it except It and the two editions of The… |
| 1993 | Trainspotting | Secker and Warburg published Trainspotting in 1993, and it was longlisted for that year's Booker Prize. Multiple accounts from people close to the… |
| 1993 | The Virgin Suicides | The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993, Eugenides's first novel, and readers and critics have compared its collective narrator to a Greek chorus,… |
| 1992 | The Secret History | Alfred A. Knopf published The Secret History on September 16, 1992, with an unusually large first printing of seventy five thousand copies for a… |
| 1992 | Snow Crash | Bantam published Snow Crash in June 1992. It was a genuine nominee on two prize shortlists that did not yet know how much the book would come to… |
| 1991 | Outlander | Delacorte published Outlander in the United States on June 1, 1991, under the title Cross Stitch in Britain. Romance Writers of America gave it the… |
| 1991 | American Psycho | Simon and Schuster paid Ellis a three hundred thousand dollar advance and scheduled the novel for March 1991 before cancelling the contract late in… |
| 1990 | The Things They Carried | Houghton Mifflin published The Things They Carried on March 28, 1990, and the Chicago Tribune gave it the 1990 Heartland Prize for fiction outright.… |
| 1990 | Jurassic Park | Jurassic Park was published in 1990 and was an enormous commercial success, selling around nine million copies by the time Steven Spielberg's… |
| 1989 | The Joy Luck Club | G. P. Putnam's Sons published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, and the Commonwealth Club of California awarded it a gold medal for fiction, a real prize… |
| 1989 | A Prayer for Owen Meany | William Morrow published the novel in March 1989, six hundred seventeen pages that became, by Irving's own publisher's account, his bestselling book… |
| 1988 | The Alchemist | Rocco published O Alquimista in Brazil in 1988, and the book sold poorly enough in its first run that Coelho's original publisher dropped him before… |
| 1988 | Cat's Eye | McClelland and Stewart published Cat's Eye in September 1988, and it was shortlisted that year for Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction and,… |
| 1987 | The Bonfire of the Vanities | Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Bonfire of the Vanities in October 1987 after Wolfe had already serialized an earlier version in Rolling… |
| 1987 | Norwegian Wood | Kodansha published Norwegian Wood in Japan in 1987, and the novel became an overwhelming commercial phenomenon there, selling millions of copies and… |
| 1986 | The Sportswriter | Vintage published The Sportswriter in March 1986, and it was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction, an honor separate from the Pulitzer… |
| 1986 | It | Viking published It in September 1986, and it became the best selling hardcover fiction title in the United States that year according to Publishers… |
| 1985 | Perfume | Diogenes published Das Parfum in German in 1985, and John E. Woods's English translation, published as Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, won the PEN… |
| 1985 | Blood Meridian | Random House published Blood Meridian in April 1985 to a small readership and modest reviews; it won no prize that year, and McCarthy's own Pulitzer,… |
| 1984 | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Kundera wrote the novel in Czech under Communist rule and it first appeared in French translation from Gallimard in 1984, since Czechoslovak… |
| 1984 | Money | Jonathan Cape published Money, subtitled A Suicide Note, in 1984, drawing partly on Amis's own experience scripting the poorly received 1980 film… |
| 1983 | The Colour of Magic | Colin Smythe published The Colour of Magic in November 1983 in a first printing of only about five hundred copies, and no award marked its arrival;… |
| 1983 | Pet Sematary | Doubleday published Pet Sematary in November 1983, four years after King wrote it and initially set it aside as too disturbing to release. It was… |
| 1982 | The House of the Spirits | Plaza y Janes published La casa de los espiritus in Barcelona in 1982 after several publishers in Allende's own region turned it down, and the book… |
| 1982 | Different Seasons | Viking published Different Seasons in August 1982, and King explained in his own afterword that he had held these stories back for years because… |
| 1981 | The Hotel New Hampshire | E. P. Dutton published The Hotel New Hampshire in 1981, three years after The World According to Garp had made Irving a bestselling novelist, and… |
| 1981 | Red Dragon | G. P. Putnam's Sons published Red Dragon in 1981, and Stephen King, reviewing it in The Washington Post, called it probably the best popular novel to… |
| 1980 | The Clan of the Cave Bear | Crown published The Clan of the Cave Bear in 1980, and it earned Auel a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and a nomination for the… |
| 1980 | Housekeeping | Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Housekeeping in 1980, Robinson's first novel, and it won the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award in 1982, the prize… |
| 1979 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Adams developed the story first as a BBC radio comedy broadcast in 1978 before turning it into this novel, published in Britain by Pan Books in… |
| 1979 | Kindred | Kindred appeared in June 1979 from Doubleday and earned no award in its own time; Butler said she wrote it to answer younger Black activists who… |
| 1978 | The Stand | Doubleday published The Stand on October 3, 1978, at 823 pages after King, at his own publisher's insistence that the book's full length would be… |
| 1978 | The Cement Garden | Jonathan Cape published The Cement Garden in 1978, McEwan's first novel after two earlier story collections. No literary prize marked its release.… |
| 1977 | The Shining | Doubleday published The Shining on January 28, 1977, King's third novel and his first hardcover bestseller. It received a nomination for the 1978… |
| 1977 | Dispatches | Alfred A. Knopf published Dispatches in 1977, drawing on pieces Herr had published individually in magazines between 1968 and 1976. It is often… |
| 1976 | The Selfish Gene | Oxford University Press published The Selfish Gene in 1976. No dedicated science book prize existed to recognize it on release; nothing comparable to… |
| 1976 | Interview with the Vampire | Alfred A. Knopf published Interview with the Vampire in 1976, after Rice expanded it from a short story she had written years earlier; she wrote much… |
| 1975 | The Female Man | Russ wrote most of the novel around 1970, but Bantam did not publish it until February 1975. It was a finalist for the 1975 Nebula Award for Best… |
| 1975 | 'Salem's Lot | Doubleday published Salem's Lot on October 17, 1975, King's second novel, printed in an initial run of thirty thousand hardcover copies similar to… |
| 1974 | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | Hodder and Stoughton published Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in June 1974. No major literary prize marked its release, though Richard Locke, reviewing it… |
| 1974 | Carrie | Doubleday published Carrie on April 5, 1974, in a modest hardcover printing of thirty thousand copies. King, twenty six and teaching high school… |
| 1973 | The Princess Bride | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published The Princess Bride in 1973 under its full original title, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of… |
| 1973 | Sula | Knopf published Sula in November 1973. The National Book Award for Fiction named it a finalist in 1975, alongside work by Philip Roth and Vladimir… |
| 1972 | Surfacing | McClelland and Stewart published Surfacing in Canada in 1972, Atwood's second novel and a deliberate companion piece to her poetry collection Power… |
| 1972 | Invisible Cities | Giulio Einaudi published Le città invisibili in Italian in 1972; William Weaver's English translation followed from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in… |
| 1971 | The Exorcist | Harper and Row published The Exorcist on May 5, 1971, loosely inspired by an actual 1949 exorcism case involving a boy publicly known as Roland Doe.… |
| 1971 | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | Rolling Stone serialized the book across two issues in November 1971 under the byline Raoul Duke before Random House published the full book on July… |
| 1970 | The Bluest Eye | No literary prize marked The Bluest Eye when Holt, Rinehart and Winston published it in 1970 in a modest first printing that drew little immediate… |
| 1970 | Deliverance | No prize marked Deliverance on its 1970 publication by Houghton Mifflin. Dickey already held a National Book Award for Poetry, won in 1966 for his… |
| 1969 | The Godfather | No literary prize marked The Godfather's release. Puzo was in his mid forties, twenty thousand dollars in debt after two well reviewed but poorly… |
| 1969 | Slaughterhouse-Five | No American fiction prize singled out Slaughterhouse Five, but two of science fiction's own did: both the 1970 Hugo and the 1970 Nebula Award for… |
| 1968 | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1968, losing to Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage in a year… |
| 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | The novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey was not itself a finalist for the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Novel, an award that went instead to John… |
| 1967 | The Outsiders | No major American literary prize considered The Outsiders on its 1967 arrival, a category gap the novel itself helped expose, since young adult… |
| 1967 | The Master and Margarita | No prize could have recognized The Master and Margarita in its own time; Bulgakov died in 1940, more than a quarter century before any version of the… |
| 1966 | The Crying of Lot 49 | The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award in 1967, a real prize given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters… |
| 1966 | In Cold Blood | In Cold Blood won the 1966 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime from the Mystery Writers of America, a real and specific prize for a book that essentially… |
| 1965 | The Magus | No literary prize marked The Magus on either its 1965 publication or its 1977 revision, and none is recorded as having shortlisted it; the Booker… |
| 1965 | Stoner | Stoner won no prize and found almost no readers in 1965; it sold fewer than two thousand copies and went out of print within a year, despite The New… |
| 1964 | Last Exit to Brooklyn | No literary prize considered Last Exit to Brooklyn; its documented 1960s history is a courtroom fight rather than an award. British publisher John… |
| 1964 | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | No major literary prize marked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on arrival, but real recognition came later from readers rather than juries: it won… |
| 1963 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath died by suicide on February 11, 1963, less than a month after The Bell Jar appeared under her pseudonym, and that timing has shaped… |
| 1963 | Cat's Cradle | Cat's Cradle was a finalist for the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of five nominees that year; the award went to Clifford Simak's Way Station,… |
| 1962 | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Novy Mir published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in November 1962, the first literary account of Stalin era labor camps ever permitted in… |
| 1962 | A Clockwork Orange | No prize marked A Clockwork Orange on arrival in 1962; its early reception ran instead through reviewers arguing about what it was doing rather than… |
| 1961 | Revolutionary Road | Revolutionary Road was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction alongside Catch-22 and Franny and Zooey, all three losing to Walker… |
| 1961 | Franny and Zooey | Franny and Zooey was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, part of the same crowded field that lost to Walker Percy's The… |
| 1961 | Catch-22 | Catch-22 was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, losing to Walker Percy's debut novel The Moviegoer. Reviews at the time split… |
| 1960 | The Country Girls | Hutchinson published The Country Girls in 1960, and Ireland's Censorship of Publications Board banned it almost immediately under the 1929 censorship… |
| 1960 | Rabbit, Run | Rabbit, Run was a finalist for the 1961 National Book Award for fiction, one of eleven books on an unusually crowded list that also included Harper… |
| 1959 | Naked Lunch | Olympia Press published Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959, and Grove Press brought out the American edition in November 1962. No literary prize… |
| 1959 | A Separate Peace | Secker and Warburg published A Separate Peace in Britain in 1959, with Macmillan's American edition following in 1960; the book won the William… |
| 1958 | Things Fall Apart | Heinemann published Things Fall Apart in London on June 17, 1958, in a first printing of about two thousand copies, and it found instant acclaim in… |
| 1958 | The Once and Future King | Collins published The Once and Future King in 1958, gathering and revising three books White had published separately between 1938 and 1940 and… |
| 1958 | Breakfast at Tiffany's | Esquire ran Breakfast at Tiffany's in its November 1958 issue, after Harper's Bazaar had reportedly declined it as too racy for its readers, and… |
| 1957 | On the Road | Viking Press published On the Road on September 5, 1957, and Gilbert Millstein's advance review in the New York Times called it a major novel and its… |
| 1957 | Doctor Zhivago | Soviet publishers rejected Doctor Zhivago in 1956 as an implicit rejection of Communist ideology, so Pasternak had the manuscript smuggled out to the… |
| 1956 | Howl and Other Poems | City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems in the autumn of 1956, as the fourth title in its Pocket Poets Series, and the New York Times poet… |
| 1956 | Giovanni's Room | Baldwin's American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, rejected the manuscript outright and reportedly urged him to burn it, warning that a book about white… |
| 1955 | The Talented Mr. Ripley | Coward McCann published The Talented Mr. Ripley in America in 1955, and it was a nominee for the Mystery Writers of America's 1956 Edgar Award for… |
| 1955 | The Quiet American | William Heinemann published The Quiet American in December 1955, and it landed well in Britain but detonated in the United States on its 1956… |
| 1955 | Lolita | Every major American publisher Nabokov approached, including Viking, Simon and Schuster and Doubleday, turned the manuscript down, and it was finally… |
| 1954 | Under Milk Wood | The BBC Third Programme broadcast Under Milk Wood for the first time on January 25, 1954, two months after Thomas's death, produced by Douglas… |
| 1954 | The Fellowship of the Ring | George Allen and Unwin published The Fellowship of the Ring on July 29, 1954, the first of three volumes making up The Lord of the Rings; no British… |
| 1953 | Fahrenheit 451 | Ballantine Books published Fahrenheit 451 on October 19, 1953, and it won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the… |
| 1953 | Casino Royale | Jonathan Cape published Casino Royale on April 13, 1953, and its first printing of 4,728 copies sold out within a month; no crime fiction prize was… |
| 1952 | East of Eden | Viking published East of Eden on September 19, 1952, and it split critics almost exactly down the middle. Orville Prescott in the New York Times… |
| 1952 | Charlotte's Web | Harper and Brothers published Charlotte's Web on October 15, 1952, with illustrations by Garth Williams, and it took a 1953 Newbery Honor, one rung… |
| 1951 | The Day of the Triffids | Michael Joseph published The Day of the Triffids in Britain in December 1951, after a shortened version had already run in Collier's magazine in the… |
| 1951 | The Catcher in the Rye | Little, Brown published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951. Nash K. Burger called it an unusually brilliant novel in the New York Times, and… |
| 1950 | The Martian Chronicles | Doubleday published The Martian Chronicles on May 4, 1950, three years before the Hugo Award existed to recognize science fiction at all, so no genre… |
| 1950 | I, Robot | No prize of 1950 was built to weigh a science fiction collection from a small specialty press: the 1951 Pulitzer went to Conrad Richter's The Town,… |
| 1949 | The Sheltering Sky | Bowles, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when John Lehmann published The Sheltering Sky in Britain in 1949, ahead… |
| 1949 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | Orwell was British, which placed Nineteen Eighty Four outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of Harcourt Brace's simultaneous American… |
| 1948 | The Naked and the Dead | Mailer, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when The Naked and the Dead appeared in 1948, but the 1949 prize went to… |
| 1948 | I Capture the Castle | Smith was British, which placed I Capture the Castle outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of its 1948 publication. The 1949 Pulitzer… |
| 1947 | Under the Volcano | Lowry was British by birth, which placed Under the Volcano outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction despite its American co publication by Reynal and… |
| 1947 | The Diary of a Young Girl | The diary is nonfiction, an actual document rather than an invented narrative, so it was never eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in any… |
| 1946 | Titus Groan | Peake was British, which placed Titus Groan outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of Eyre and Spottiswoode's 1946 London publication. The… |
| 1946 | The Street | Petry won a real prize before The Street existed as a finished book: the opening chapters earned her the 1945 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, a… |
| 1945 | Cannery Row | Steinbeck, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when Cannery Row appeared in January 1945, but no prize came for it.… |
| 1945 | Animal Farm | Orwell was a British citizen, which placed Animal Farm outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of its wartime difficulty finding any… |
| 1944 | The Razor's Edge | Maugham was a British subject, which placed The Razor's Edge outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of Doubleday Doran's 1944 American… |
| 1944 | Ficciones | Borges was Argentine and Ficciones was first published in Buenos Aires in Spanish, which placed it outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on every… |
| 1943 | The Little Prince | Saint-Exupéry was a French citizen, which placed The Little Prince outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction even though Reynal and Hitchcock published… |
| 1943 | The Fountainhead | Rand, a naturalized American citizen since 1931, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when Bobbs Merrill published The Fountainhead in May… |
| 1942 | The Stranger | L'Etranger appeared in French from a Paris publisher and its author held French Algerian citizenship, which placed it outside the Pulitzer Prize for… |
| 1942 | The Screwtape Letters | Lewis was British, which placed The Screwtape Letters outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, restricted at the time to American citizens regardless… |
| 1941 | The Last Tycoon | No prize weighed an unfinished novel assembled by an editor from a dead man's notes, and none is recorded as having considered this one. The 1942… |
| 1941 | Between the Acts | No prize marked Between the Acts on its publication by Hogarth Press, the small press Woolf ran with Leonard, in the summer of 1941, months after her… |
| 1940 | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | No Pulitzer Prize for the Novel went to any book in 1941, the year a novel published in 1940 would have competed, but the reason had nothing to do… |
| 1940 | Native Son | Harper and Brothers published Native Son on March 1, 1940, and Orson Welles directed a stage adaptation that opened on Broadway barely a year later,… |
| 1940 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Charles Scribner's Sons published For Whom the Bell Tolls on October 21, 1940, in a first printing of seventy five thousand copies, and the 1941… |
| 1939 | The Day of the Locust | Random House published The Day of the Locust in May 1939, and it sold poorly, fewer than fifteen hundred copies in its first run, a commercial… |
| 1939 | The Big Sleep | Alfred A. Knopf published The Big Sleep in 1939, introducing Philip Marlowe in his first full novel after years of Chandler's pulp magazine stories.… |
| 1939 | And Then There Were None | Collins Crime Club published the novel in Britain in November 1939, and Maurice Richardson in the Observer called it one of the very best and most… |
| 1938 | Rebecca | Rebecca won the National Book Award for the year's favorite novel of 1938, a prize voted on by members of the American Booksellers Association rather… |
| 1938 | Brighton Rock | William Heinemann published Brighton Rock in 1938, and no prize marked it; the recognition came for the two novels that followed, The Power and the… |
| 1937 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | J. B. Lippincott published Their Eyes Were Watching God in September 1937 to a mixed reception among Hurston's own Harlem Renaissance peers. Richard… |
| 1937 | The Hobbit | The Hobbit was nominated for Britain's Carnegie Medal in only the award's second year, 1937, when the medal went to Eve Garnett's The Family from One… |
| 1937 | Of Mice and Men | Covici Friede published Of Mice and Men in 1937 as a Book of the Month Club selection, and Steinbeck's own Broadway adaptation won the New York Drama… |
| 1936 | Nightwood | Faber and Faber published Nightwood in Britain in 1936, with Harcourt Brace following in the United States in 1937; no literary prize marked a novel… |
| 1936 | Absalom, Absalom! | Random House published Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, eligible for the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for the novel alongside Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the… |
| 1935 | Tortilla Flat | Covici Friede published Tortilla Flat in 1935, and the following year the Commonwealth Club of California awarded it the Gold Medal for best novel by… |
| 1935 | Mr Norris Changes Trains | Hogarth Press published the novel in Britain in 1935; an American publisher retitled it The Last of Mr Norris, reportedly convinced that American… |
| 1934 | Tender Is the Night | Charles Scribner's Sons published Tender Is the Night on April 12, 1934, after serialization in Scribner's Magazine, and reviewers split sharply: J.… |
| 1934 | Murder on the Orient Express | Collins Crime Club published the novel on January 1, 1934, and it became, by contemporary advertising claims, Christie's best selling book to that… |
| 1933 | Testament of Youth | Victor Gollancz published Testament of Youth in Britain in 1933, with Macmillan bringing out an American edition the same year, and the memoir became… |
| 1933 | Lost Horizon | Lost Horizon did win a prize, and an old one: Macmillan published it in 1933 and in 1934 it took the Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain's oldest… |
| 1932 | Journey to the End of the Night | Denoël et Steele published the novel in October 1932, and it became the clear favorite for that year's Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious… |
| 1932 | Brave New World | No prize existed yet for science fiction when Chatto and Windus published Brave New World in February 1932; the Hugo Award would not begin until… |
| 1931 | The Waves | No prize marked The Waves on its publication by Hogarth Press on October 22, 1931. Woolf's one literary prize, the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse of 1928,… |
| 1931 | Sanctuary | Reviewers met Sanctuary's February 1931 publication with far more alarm than admiration, treating the violence as the whole of the book rather than… |
| 1930 | The Maltese Falcon | No mystery prize existed to recognize The Maltese Falcon when Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1930, after Black Mask magazine had already run it in… |
| 1930 | As I Lay Dying | No prize considered As I Lay Dying on its October 1930 publication by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, and it sold modestly, read at the time mainly… |
| 1929 | The Sound and the Fury | The novel sold poorly on its October 1929 publication by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, and Clifton Fadiman, reviewing it in The Nation, dismissed… |
| 1929 | Look Homeward, Angel | Wolfe's editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, pushed hard for cuts to the sprawling original manuscript, trimming roughly sixty thousand words… |
| 1929 | All Quiet on the Western Front | The Vossische Zeitung serialized the novel through November and December 1928 and Propylaen published it as a book on January 29, 1929; it sold… |
| 1929 | A Farewell to Arms | Reviewers largely admired the novel on its 1929 publication by Charles Scribner's Sons; the New York Times called it a moving and beautiful book, and… |
| 1928 | Orlando | No real literary prize touched Orlando; the prize Orlando wins for her poem inside the novel exists only within Woolf's own invented biography, a… |
| 1928 | Lady Chatterley's Lover | No literary prize was ever associated with Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Lawrence, who died in 1930, received none for it or for any other book in his… |
| 1927 | To the Lighthouse | To the Lighthouse won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in 1928, an English language prize judged by a jury of French women and awarded the year before to… |
| 1927 | Death Comes for the Archbishop | Death Comes for the Archbishop did not go unrecognized. The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Cather its William Dean Howells Medal, awarded… |
| 1926 | Winnie-the-Pooh | The Newbery Medal already existed by 1926, first awarded in 1922 for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. Milne… |
| 1926 | The Sun Also Rises | Reviewers split hard on publication. The New York Times praised its magnificent writing and lean, athletic prose, and Conrad Aiken singled out the… |
| 1925 | The Trial | Kafka won no literary prize in his lifetime and published only a handful of shorter works under his own supervision. Prize money reached him exactly… |
| 1925 | The Great Gatsby | The Great Gatsby sold fewer than twenty thousand copies in its first six months and earned Fitzgerald roughly two thousand dollars in royalties, a… |
| 1925 | Mrs Dalloway | No prize marked Mrs Dalloway's publication by Hogarth Press, Woolf's own small press, on May 14, 1925, and none came for it later. Woolf collected… |
| 1924 | The Magic Mountain | No book prize existed to weigh in on The Magic Mountain specifically when S. Fischer Verlag published it in November 1924, and none is recorded as… |
| 1924 | A Passage to India | A Passage to India was recognized twice, and quickly. It took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1924, the year Edward Arnold… |
| 1923 | The Prophet | No literary prize considered The Prophet on its 1923 publication by Alfred A. Knopf, and none is recorded as having weighed it since; this was a work… |
| 1923 | Cane | Cane sold poorly on its 1923 publication by Boni and Liveright and was largely ignored by general readers, Black and white alike, even as critics who… |
| 1922 | Ulysses | United States customs officials banned the novel as obscene for over a decade, and no major prize committee of the era would touch a book an American… |
| 1922 | Siddhartha | No literary prize considered the book on its 1922 German publication, and the novel took decades to reach English readers at all, appearing in the… |
| 1921 | Three Soldiers | The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel awarded in 1922 went to Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, a small town comedy of manners, and Three Soldiers received… |
| 1921 | Crome Yellow | Britain already had two book prizes in 1921, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, both founded in 1919, and neither went to… |
| 1920 | This Side of Paradise | Charles Scribner's Sons published This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, after rejecting two earlier versions of the manuscript under a different… |
| 1920 | Main Street | The 1921 Pulitzer jury actually recommended Main Street for the prize, but the Pulitzer board overturned that recommendation and awarded the fiction… |
| 1919 | Winesburg, Ohio | The Pulitzer for the novel, then two years old, gave no award at all in 1920, the year Winesburg, Ohio would have been in contention, and the book… |
| 1919 | The Moon and Sixpence | William Heinemann published The Moon and Sixpence in London on April 15, 1919. Maugham was among the most widely read novelists in the English… |
| 1918 | The Return of the Soldier | West published one of the earliest serious literary treatments of shell shock while the war was still being fought, and as a British author she was… |
| 1918 | My Ántonia | The Pulitzer Prize for the novel was brand new when the book appeared: the first award, in 1918, had gone to Ernest Poole's His Family, and the 1919… |
| 1915 | The Metamorphosis | Kafka won no literary prize in his short life and published sparingly under his own supervision; most of his major works appeared only after his 1924… |
| 1914 | Dubliners | The book appeared decades before the Booker Prize existed and long before any Irish literary prize could have recognized short fiction of this kind.… |
| 1911 | The Secret Garden | The Newbery Medal did not yet exist when the novel appeared, and the Carnegie Medal was still decades away, so no children's literature prize was… |
| 1911 | Ethan Frome | The book appeared seven years before the Pulitzer Prize for fiction began in 1918, so no American award existed yet to consider it. Scribner's… |
| 1910 | Howards End | No British fiction prize of consequence existed in 1910, decades before the Booker Prize began in 1969, so Forster's novel had nothing to compete… |
| 1908 | The Wind in the Willows | The book predates both the Newbery Medal, established in 1922, and the Carnegie Medal, established in 1936, so no children's book prize existed… |
| 1908 | Anne of Green Gables | The book appeared fourteen years before the Newbery Medal began honoring children's literature in 1922, so no American prize for the category yet… |
| 1906 | The Jungle | No literary prize recognized the book in 1906, since the Pulitzer for fiction did not exist until 1918. The Jungle first ran serialized in the… |
| 1905 | The House of Mirth | No American prize for fiction existed when the novel appeared, since the Pulitzer would not begin until 1918, so nothing was there to recognize it.… |