1921 Book Award Winners
Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence and became the first woman to take the fiction prize. Anatole France won the Nobel, and Edward Bok's account of his own rise from Dutch immigrant boy to magazine editor took the biography award.
4 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Age of Innocence
Newland Archer is a young lawyer of old New York in the 1870s, newly engaged to May Welland, who is lovely, correct and exactly what his world...
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The Victory at Sea
The Victory at Sea tells William Sowden Sims's own account of commanding American naval forces in European waters during the First World War,...
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The Americanization of Edward Bok
Edward Bok tells his own American story in the third person, following a Dutch boy who arrived in Brooklyn at six years old, when his father's...
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Penguin Island
A short sighted, elderly missionary named Mael sets out from Brittany in a small stone boat, rigged and launched, he believes, by a helpful monk...
What Shaped 1921
Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence looking back at the New York of the 1870s from a Europe still counting its war dead, and the distance is the point: a society of rigid manners seen from a world that had just proved how quickly such things vanish. The prize made her the first woman to win for fiction, though the jury had actually chosen Sinclair Lewis and was overruled. America in 1921 was in a sharp recession, closing its doors to immigration, and settling into the isolation that would define the decade.
Published in 1921, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1921 and took no major award.
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No major prizeCrome Yellow
Denis Stone, a young poet, spends a summer at a country house party at Crome, mostly failing to say the right thing to Anne Wimbush, his hostess's...
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No major prizeThree Soldiers
Dos Passos follows three American soldiers of very different backgrounds through the First World War, letting the army itself, rather than the...