Winners

What Shaped 1934

The Dust Bowl reached its worst in 1934 as topsoil from the plains blew as far as Washington and New York. Prize winning fiction that year was set among poor rural people, which was where the country's attention had gone. Pirandello's Nobel honoured a playwright who had spent his career dismantling the idea of a stable self, and whose Six Characters in Search of an Author had shown a generation of dramatists that a play could be about its own machinery.

Published in 1934, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1934 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

    Snowbound between Vinkovci and Brod after the Orient Express plows into a drift, detective Hercule Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of an...

  • No major prize
    Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Psychiatrist Dick Diver marries Nicole Warren, a wealthy patient he treated for a breakdown rooted in childhood trauma, and the two become the...

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