Books That Won Both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award
1954–2025
Sixteen books have won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the two most closely watched prizes in American letters. Different bodies decide them on different calendars, the National Book Award in November and the Pulitzer the following May, so a book that takes both has survived a full year of second reading rather than one jury's enthusiasm. Seven of the sixteen are fiction, running from The Fixer and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter through The Color Purple and The Known World to The Underground Railroad and, most recently, James. The other nine are history, biography and reporting, among them The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Embracing Defeat. Bruce Catton opens the run with A Stillness at Appomattox in 1954.
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James
Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the man Twain called Jim, and the first thing he changes is the voice. In…
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The Underground Railroad
Cora is enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, an outcast among the other enslaved people because her mother ran and left her. When Caesar, newly…
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The Swerve
In the winter of 1417, an unemployed papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini rode into a German monastery hunting old manuscripts and found a copy…
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Embracing Defeat
Embracing Defeat is the history of Japan in the seven years after its surrender, 1945 to 1952, and it is that rarest of prize sweepers, a scholarly…
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The Haunted Land
When communism fell in 1989, the new democracies of Central Europe inherited a question no revolution escapes: what do you do with the people who ran…
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the definitive history of the invention that divided the twentieth century, told across nearly nine hundred pages…
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Common Ground
Common Ground is the story of the Boston busing crisis told through three families, and it may be the most thorough act of listening in American…
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The Color Purple
Celie is fourteen, poor, Black and in rural Georgia, and the man she believes is her father has told her not to tell anybody but God what he has done…
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Rabbit Is Rich
It is 1979 and Harry Angstrom has money for the first time in his life. He runs Springer Motors, his late father in law's Toyota dealership in…
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The Soul of a New Machine
The Soul of a New Machine is the best book ever written about how computers actually get built, and it was written before most Americans had touched…
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Eleanor and Franklin
Eleanor and Franklin is the story of a marriage that shaped a century, told by a man who knew one of its partners as well as anyone alive. Joseph…
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Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom covers the last five years of Franklin Roosevelt's life, 1940 to 1945, the years in which the president of the…
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The Fixer
Yakov Bok is a fixer, a man who mends whatever is brought to him, and at the start of the book he has nothing left in his village: no work, no money,…
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Porter published very little and discarded most of what she wrote, and this is the whole of it: twenty six stories, gathered from three earlier books…
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A Fable
On a Monday in May 1918, a French regiment ordered over the top refuses to attack. The mutiny is the work of a corporal and his twelve followers, who…
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A Stillness at Appomattox
A Stillness at Appomattox follows the Army of the Potomac through the last year of the Civil War, from the moment Grant comes east in the spring of…