Winners

  • Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson

    A family of five moves onto a mortgaged farm at the start of the Depression, and one of the three daughters tells you, from the November at the far...

  • The Colonial Period of American History by Charles McLean Andrews

    Charles McLean Andrews built The Colonial Period of American History as a four volume history of the English colonies from their founding through...

  • R. E. Lee by Douglas S. Freeman

    Douglas Southall Freeman spent years of research, including interviews with surviving members of Lee's own army and deep study of West Point and...

  • Bright Ambush by Audrey Wurdemann

    Bright Ambush, published in 1934, collects the poems of a poet still in her early twenties at the time of writing, and it turns over love,...

  • Dobry by Monica Shannon

    Dobry grows up on a small farm in a Bulgarian village, helping his widowed mother and his grandfather work the land the way farming families in the...

What Shaped 1935

Now in November is a Depression novel written while the Depression was happening, the story of a family losing a farm through drought and debt, told by a daughter who can see it coming and cannot stop it. Johnson was writing about the present rather than looking back at it, which is rarer in prize lists than it sounds. Freeman's four volume life of Lee, meanwhile, was the fullest expression yet of a view of the Confederacy that later historians would spend decades complicating.

Published in 1935, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1935 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

    William Bradshaw, an Englishman teaching in Berlin, meets Arthur Norris on a train crossing into Germany, an ill fitting wigged gentleman traveling...

  • No major prize
    Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

    Danny, a young paisano just home from the First World War, unexpectedly inherits two small houses in Monterey's Tortilla Flat and shares them with...

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