1930 Book Award Winners
Oliver La Farge won the Pulitzer for Laughing Boy, a novel of two young Navajo people pulled apart by the world outside the reservation. Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
6 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Laughing Boy
Laughing Boy is a young Navajo silversmith and horseman from a traditional family, and he meets Slim Girl at a ceremonial dance in 1915. She is...
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The War of Independence
Claude H. Van Tyne's The War of Independence carries forward the project he had begun seven years earlier with The Causes of the War of...
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The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston
Marquis James opens his life of Sam Houston with the sixteen year old who ran away from his Tennessee home to live among a Cherokee community led...
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Selected Poems
This 1929 Selected Poems draws together a decade and more of Conrad Aiken's work into a single volume, and across it the same preoccupation recurs...
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Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
Carved from a piece of mountain ash by a traveling peddler in Maine sometime in the 1820s, Hitty is a small wooden doll made for a girl named...
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Babbitt
George F. Babbitt sells real estate in the fictional midwestern city of Zenith and believes, with total sincerity, everything his country club, his...
What Shaped 1930
Lewis's Nobel was a national event, and his acceptance lecture used the platform to attack American letters for its complacency and its universities for teaching literature as if it had stopped in 1880. Coming four years after he had refused the Pulitzer on principle, the speech confirmed him as the most quotable critic of the culture that had just crowned him. La Farge won meanwhile for a book that treated Navajo life as a subject deserving a novel of its own, which was rare enough in 1930 to be worth noting.
Published in 1930, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1930 and took no major award.
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No major prizeAs I Lay Dying
When Addie Bundren dies on the family's poor Mississippi farm, her husband Anse insists on honoring her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson,...
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No major prizeThe Maltese Falcon
San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade takes on a new client calling herself Miss Wonderly, who wants a man named Thursby followed, and...