Fond Books
The Year in Prizes

1946 Book Award Winners

For the second time the Pulitzer jury named no novel at all. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer for The Age of Jackson, Hermann Hesse took the Nobel, and Lois Lenski's Strawberry Girl won the Newbery Medal.

5 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for History to Nobel Prize in Literature

Winners

  • Pulitzer Prize for History
    The Age of Jackson by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

    Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reinterprets Jacksonian democracy as a struggle over economic power rather than a story about the frontier remaking...

  • Pulitzer Prize for Biography
    Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir by Linnie Marsh Wolfe

    Linnie Marsh Wolfe came to John Muir's life as a devoted specialist rather than a professional biographer, a Los Angeles librarian who spent years...

  • Newbery Medal
    Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski

    Birdie Boyer's family moves from North Carolina to the backwoods of central Florida to grow strawberries, settling next to the Slater family, whose...

  • Caldecott Medal
    The Rooster Crows by Maud and Miska Petersham

    This collection gathers American nursery rhymes, counting out chants, skipping rope rhymes and finger games that children once passed around on...

  • Nobel Prize in Literature
    Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

    Harry Haller is a middle aged intellectual so estranged from ordinary life that he thinks of himself as two creatures sharing one body, a civilized...

What Shaped 1946

The first full year of peace was spent working out what the war had meant. The Nuremberg trials ran through the autumn, the United Nations held its first session, and Churchill described an iron curtain falling across Europe. Schlesinger's Age of Jackson recast American democracy as a story of class conflict rather than frontier expansion and set the terms for a generation of historians. Hesse's Nobel honoured a writer who had opposed German nationalism through both wars from exile in Switzerland.

Published in 1946, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1946 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    The Street by Ann Petry

    Lutie Johnson, a single Black mother recently separated from her unfaithful husband, moves with her young son Bub into a cramped apartment on a...

  • No major prize
    Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

    In the vast, crumbling castle of Gormenghast, ruled by the seventy sixth Earl Sepulchrave through rituals so old that no one, including the Earl...

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