1938 Book Award Winners
Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to do so. John P. Marquand took the Pulitzer for The Late George Apley, and the Caldecott Medal was awarded for the first time, to Dorothy P. Lathrop for Animals of the Bible.
8 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Late George Apley
George Apley of Beacon Street is dead, and his son John has asked Mr Horatio Willing, family friend and professional memorialist, to write the...
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The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900
Paul Herman Buck's study follows the decades after Appomattox as Northern and Southern white Americans rebuilt a shared national feeling out of a...
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Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott
Odell Shepard titles his biography of Amos Bronson Alcott with a double reference, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and to the young Alcott's actual...
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The Life of Andrew Jackson
Marquis James built his life of Andrew Jackson from two earlier books, Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain and Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a...
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Cold Morning Sky
Cold Morning Sky gathers Marya Zaturenska's quiet, image driven lyrics on solitude, the passage of the seasons and a half elegiac feeling for an...
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The White Stag
Seredy retells a legend of Hungary's founding, following the warrior peoples she calls the Huns and the Magyars as they migrate west out of Asia...
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Animals of the Bible, A Picture Book
This picture book gathers passages from the King James Bible and pairs them with the animals that move through its stories, from the creatures...
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The Good Earth
Wang Lung, a poor farmer in early twentieth century China, marries O-lan, a formerly enslaved kitchen servant with no dowry and no beauty anyone...
What Shaped 1938
Buck's Nobel was controversial in American letters, where critics thought her popular success disqualified her, and the Academy's citation pointed instead at her portraits of Chinese peasant life and her biographies of her parents. The Caldecott Medal began that year, named for the Victorian illustrator Randolph Caldecott and created to do for picture books what the Newbery had done for children's writing: insist that the pictures were the work, not decoration around it. In Europe the Munich Agreement in September bought a year of peace that nobody believed in.
Published in 1938, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1938 and took no major award.
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No major prizeBrighton Rock
A newspaperman named Fred Hale arrives in Brighton already marked for death, hunted through the crowds by a teenage gang leader named Pinkie Brown...
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No major prizeRebecca
An unnamed young woman working as a paid companion meets and, after a brief courtship in Monte Carlo, marries Maximilian de Winter, a wealthy...