Winners

What Shaped 1936

O'Neill's Nobel recognised a writer who had almost single handedly given the United States a serious theatre, dragging American drama away from melodrama and towards the long, punishing family plays that would culminate in Long Day's Journey into Night. Elsewhere 1936 was the year the Spanish Civil War began in July and drew writers from across Europe and America into it as soldiers and reporters. Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind that summer and would take the Pulitzer with it the following spring.

Published in 1936, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1936 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

    Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere in particular, seizes a hundred square miles of land from its Chickasaw owners, and builds a...

  • No major prize
    Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

    In 1920s Paris, Felix Volkbein, a man obsessed with a claim to noble ancestry he cannot fully prove, meets Robin Vote through the loquacious,...

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