Winners

  • Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield

    The Pentlands are the oldest money north of Boston, a family so long established that its fortune, its house and its legend have replaced anything...

  • Pinckney's Treaty by Samuel Flagg Bemis

    Samuel Flagg Bemis built Pinckney's Treaty around the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, the agreement that finally secured the young United States free...

  • Whitman by Emory Holloway

    Emory Holloway had already spent seven years recovering lost writing by Walt Whitman, publishing a two volume collection of the poet's uncollected...

  • Fiddler's Farewell by Leonora Speyer

    Fiddler's Farewell brings together the poems Leonora Speyer had written by the mid 1920s, and its governing sensibility, evident from the title...

  • Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James

    Will James tells the whole story from inside a horse's own experience, opening with Smoky's wild birth on the open range and following him through...

  • Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson

    Creative Evolution is a philosophical argument, not a story, and its target is Darwinian evolution as popularly understood: a mechanical process of...

What Shaped 1927

Charles Lindbergh flew alone from New York to Paris in May 1927 and became the most famous man alive, and the year has kept his name ever since. The Swedish Academy went in the opposite direction and gave its prize to Bergson, whose writing on time, memory and intuition had shaped a generation of novelists including Proust. It remains one of the clearest statements the Nobel has made that literature includes the essay and the argument, not only the story.

Published in 1927, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1927 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

    A young French bishop named Jean Marie Latour arrives in the newly acquired New Mexico Territory after the Mexican American War, tasked with...

  • No major prize
    To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

    The Ramsay family spends a summer at their house on the Isle of Skye, where young James wants desperately to sail out to the nearby lighthouse and...

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