1947 Book Award Winners
Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer for All the King's Men, his novel of a Southern governor modelled on Huey Long. Robert Lowell took the poetry prize for Lord Weary's Castle, and André Gide won the Nobel.
7 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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All the King's Men
Willie Stark starts as a hick lawyer in an unnamed Deep South state, gets used by the machine as a decoy candidate, discovers on a courthouse...
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Scientists Against Time
James Phinney Baxter III, writing from his position as official historian of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, tells how...
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The Autobiography of William Allen White
This is William Allen White's own account of his life, finished shortly before his death in 1944 and published posthumously two years later, and it...
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Lord Weary's Castle
Lord Weary's Castle was Robert Lowell's second book, published in 1946 when he was not yet thirty, and it revises five poems from his 1944 debut,...
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Miss Hickory
Miss Hickory is a doll fashioned from an apple wood twig body topped with a hickory nut for a head, living in a corncob house in the New Hampshire...
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The Little Island
A small island sits alone in the sea through a full turn of seasons, weathering storms, warming under summer sun, and watching gulls, fish and the...
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The Immoralist
Michel narrates his own recent history one night to three old friends, and Gide gives the reader nothing else to judge the story by. A scholar...
What Shaped 1947
All the King's Men asks how a man who genuinely helps the poor becomes someone worth destroying, and it arrived as the Cold War was starting to make that question urgent everywhere. The Truman Doctrine was announced in March 1947 and the Marshall Plan in June, committing America to a global contest it had spent the previous decades avoiding. Lowell had been jailed during the war as a conscientious objector, and his first major collection came out of that refusal.
Published in 1947, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1947 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Diary of a Young Girl
From June 1942, when her family went into hiding in a concealed annex above her father's Amsterdam office building, until her final entry on 1...
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No major prizeUnder the Volcano
On the Day of the Dead in November 1938, in the fictional Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul stripped of his...