Fond Books
The Year in Prizes

1918 Book Award Winners

Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for His Family, a novel about a widower and his three daughters in a New York that will not stay still. Sara Teasdale took the poetry prize for Love Songs, and James Ford Rhodes was honoured for his history of the Civil War.

4 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Winners

What Shaped 1918

The war ended in November 1918 and the influenza pandemic that came with it killed more people than the fighting had. The first fiction prize went to a quiet domestic novel rather than anything about the trenches, which was true of most American writing that year. The literature of the war arrived a decade later, when the men who fought it had found the distance to write. Rhodes and his Civil War volumes speak to the other preoccupation of the moment, a country still explaining its worst conflict to itself more than fifty years on.

Published in 1918, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1918 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    My Ántonia by Willa Cather

    Narrator Jim Burden, orphaned and sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie, recalls his childhood friendship with Antonia...

  • No major prize
    The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

    Captain Chris Baldry returns from the trenches of the Western Front shell shocked and missing fifteen years of memory, believing himself still a...

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