1939 Book Award Winners
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings won the Pulitzer for The Yearling. Carl Van Doren took the biography prize for Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Handforth's Mei Li won the Caldecott Medal.
7 prizes awarded · 3 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Yearling
Jody Baxter is the only surviving child of Penny and Ora Baxter, scratching a living from a clearing in the Florida scrub in the years after the...
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A History of American Magazines
Frank Luther Mott's history of the American magazine began as doctoral research at the University of Iowa in the late 1920s and grew into a project...
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Benjamin Franklin
Carl Van Doren, better known as a literary critic than a biographer, spent years assembling a single volume life of Benjamin Franklin built to...
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Selected Poems
This 1938 Selected Poems traces John Gould Fletcher's full arc as a poet, from his early experiments as a founding member of the Imagist movement...
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Thimble Summer
A long drought breaks on the Linden family's Wisconsin farm the same day nine year old Garnet finds a small silver thimble in the dried bed of the...
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Mei Li
A spirited girl named Mei Li sets out with her older brother San Yu for the New Year fair in a walled city in northern China, determined to see...
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Meek Heritage
Juha Toivola is born into rural poverty in nineteenth century Finland and never manages to climb out of it, and Frans Eemil Sillanpää builds the...
What Shaped 1939
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Second World War began. American prize lists that autumn still belonged to a country at peace: a boy and a fawn in the Florida scrub, a life of Franklin, a picture book set in Peking. Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in April and it became the year's bestselling novel, was burned and banned in parts of California, and would take the Pulitzer twelve months later. It is one of the few cases where the argument and the prize arrived in the right order.
Published in 1939, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1939 and took no major award.
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No major prizeAnd Then There Were None
Ten strangers, each guilty of a death the law never punished, receive invitations to an isolated island off the English coast from a host who never...
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No major prizeThe Big Sleep
Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by the wealthy, dying General Sternwood to deal with a blackmail scheme tied to his wild...
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No major prizeThe Day of the Locust
Tod Hackett, a Yale trained painter working as a set designer in Depression era Hollywood, spends his days sketching the desperate hangers on drawn...