Winners

  • Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens

    Three days, the 2nd to the 4th of September 1943, at Ocanara, an Army Air Forces base in central Florida, where a project organisation studies how...

  • The Disruption of American Democracy by Roy Franklin Nichols

    Roy Franklin Nichols examines how the Democratic Party, the one national political organization still holding together voters from both North and...

  • Roosevelt and Hopkins by Robert E. Sherwood

    Robert Sherwood came to this book as an insider rather than a historian working from a distance, a three time Pulitzer winning playwright who had...

  • Terror and Decorum by Peter Viereck

    Peter Viereck published Terror and Decorum in 1948, the collection that won him the Pulitzer the following year, at a point in his career when he...

  • King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry

    Agba, a mute stable boy in the Sultan of Morocco's stables, cares for a foal born with contradictory markings, a lucky white heel and an unlucky...

  • The Big Snow by Berta and Elmer Hader

    As autumn ends, the animals around a patch of woodland prepare for winter each in their own way: geese gather and fly south, a groundhog and other...

  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

    Faulkner tells the collapse of the once prominent Compson family of Mississippi through four different narrators, each covering roughly the same...

What Shaped 1949

Faulkner's Nobel came when much of his work was out of print in America, and his acceptance speech in Stockholm, insisting that writers must write about the human heart in conflict with itself rather than about fear of the bomb, is among the most quoted things ever said about literature. The fear was reasonable: the Soviet Union tested an atomic weapon in August 1949, NATO was founded in April, and the Chinese revolution succeeded in October.

Published in 1949, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1949 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

    Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in a totalitarian London, altering old newspaper articles to match whatever the ruling Party currently...

  • No major prize
    The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

    Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a restless, unhappy American couple, travel deep into the Sahara after the Second World War with their friend...

All Collections Surprise Me