1919 Book Award Winners
Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer for The Magnificent Ambersons, his portrait of a Midwestern dynasty undone by the motor car. Henry Adams took the biography prize after his death for The Education of Henry Adams, and the poetry citation was shared between Carl Sandburg's Cornhuskers and Margaret Widdemer's The Old Road to Paradise.
5 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Magnificent Ambersons
The Ambersons are the grandest family in a midland town that is recognisably Indianapolis, and George Amberson Minafer is their only grandchild,...
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The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams, grandson and great grandson of two presidents, tells his own life story in the third person, watching a character named Henry Adams...
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Cornhuskers
Cornhuskers is Carl Sandburg's second major collection, published in 1918 while he was still working as a Chicago journalist, and it widens the...
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The Old Road to Paradise
The Old Road to Paradise is Margaret Widdemer's second collection of poems, published by Henry Holt in 1918 while the First World War was still...
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Olympian Spring
Olympian Spring imagines the Greek gods before they are gods at all, still living in the underworld and only beginning their journey up toward...
What Shaped 1919
1919 was a year of aftermath. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June, American soldiers came home to a country they did not recognise, and the summer brought labour strikes and racial violence on a scale that shocked the nation. Tarkington's novel and Adams's memoir tell the same story from opposite ends of a life: an old order giving way to industrial modernity, watched by people who cannot slow it down. Both won because that was what Americans were living through, and neither pretends the change is comfortable.
Published in 1919, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1919 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Moon and Sixpence
A conventional London stockbroker named Charles Strickland abandons his wife, children, and career at forty with no warning and almost no...
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No major prizeWinesburg, Ohio
A cycle of interconnected stories set in a fictional small Ohio town follows an assortment of lonely, thwarted residents, whom Anderson names...