Winners

What Shaped 1933

Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and the New Deal began within days, while in Germany Hitler became chancellor in January and the first camps opened by spring. Bunin's Nobel was explicitly political in effect if not in wording: the Soviet Union treated the award to an emigre as an insult, which it partly was. Turner's history, arguing that America is best understood as a set of competing regions rather than one nation, was published as the federal government began reaching into those regions on an unprecedented scale.

Published in 1933, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1933 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Lost Horizon by James Hilton

    British consul Hugh Conway is one of four passengers evacuated by aircraft from the city of Baskul during a local uprising, along with the younger...

  • No major prize
    Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

    Vera Brittain leaves Oxford's Somerville College in 1915 to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, tending wounded soldiers in London, on...

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