1952 Book Award Winners
Herman Wouk won the Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny and James Jones took the first major prize of his career, the National Book Award, for From Here to Eternity. Rachel Carson won in non fiction for The Sea Around Us.
9 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Caine Mutiny
Willie Keith, a soft Princeton boy piano player, joins the Navy to stay out of the Army and is posted to the USS Caine, a rusted First World War...
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From Here to Eternity
Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, 1941, the peacetime Army in the last year before the war, and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt has just transferred into G...
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The Uprooted
Oscar Handlin opens The Uprooted with the realization that reframes the whole book: he had set out, he wrote, to compile a history of immigrants in...
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Charles Evans Hughes
Merlo Pusey came to Charles Evans Hughes through an unusual route: researching Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court led him...
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The Sea Around Us
Before Silent Spring made Rachel Carson the founder of modern environmentalism, The Sea Around Us made her famous, and it remains one of the best...
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Collected Poems
Marianne Moore's Collected Poems gathers work going back to 1915, when her poems first appeared in The Egoist and in Poetry magazine and drew...
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Ginger Pye
Jerry Pye saves up a hard earned dollar to buy a puppy from a neighbor, Mrs. Speedy, naming him Ginger, and the dog quickly becomes the smartest,...
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Finders Keepers
Two dogs, Nap and Winkle, both dig up the same bone on the same afternoon and immediately fall into an argument over which of them actually found...
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Thérèse Desqueyroux
The novel opens with the case against Thérèse Desqueyroux already collapsing: she has been tried for poisoning her husband, Bernard, with repeated...
What Shaped 1952
Two of the year's biggest books are about the peacetime military and how it breaks the people inside it, published while the country was fighting in Korea and had stopped calling such things unthinkable. Carson's The Sea Around Us was the other story of the year: a marine biologist wrote a book about the ocean that stayed on the bestseller list for more than a year and proved a mass audience existed for serious science writing. She would use that standing a decade later for Silent Spring.
Published in 1952, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1952 and took no major award.
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No major prizeCharlotte's Web
On the Arable family farm, a runt pig named Wilbur is saved from slaughter as a piglet only because eight year old Fern Arable begs her father to...
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No major prizeEast of Eden
John Steinbeck follows two intertwined families through California's Salinas Valley from the Civil War to the First World War. Adam Trask settles...