1960 Book Award Winners
Allen Drury won the Pulitzer for Advise and Consent. Philip Roth won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, his first book, and Robert A. Heinlein took the Hugo for Starship Troopers.
11 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Advise and Consent
The President sends the Senate the name of Robert A. Leffingwell for Secretary of State, and the novel is the two weeks that follow. Drury builds...
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Goodbye, Columbus
Neil Klugman works at the Newark Public Library, lives with his aunt Gladys, and is nobody in particular, which he knows. Brenda Patimkin swims at...
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In the Days of McKinley
Margaret Leech's biography follows William McKinley from his rise as an Ohio congressman and governor to the presidency he won in 1896, then spends...
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John Paul Jones
Samuel Eliot Morison's biography follows John Paul Jones from his birth as plain John Paul in July 1747 in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, through an...
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James Joyce
Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is routinely called the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century, and the claim, made by Anthony Burgess...
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Heart's Needle
Heart's Needle, W. D. Snodgrass's 1959 debut collection, centers on a ten poem title sequence built directly from his own divorce and the resulting...
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Starship Troopers
Juan Rico signs up on impulse the day he leaves school, mostly because a friend is doing it, and because in this future only veterans may vote or...
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The Hours Before Dawn
Louise Henderson would just like some sleep. Her third child, Michael, screams through every night, her husband Mark has retreated into aggrieved...
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Onion John
Twelve year old Andy Rusch is one of the only people in the small New Jersey town of Serenity who can actually understand Onion John, an eccentric...
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Nine Days to Christmas
Ceci, a young girl in Mexico City, is finally old enough to have her own posada, the nine nights of candlelit processions and neighborhood parties...
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Anabasis
Anabasis is a long visionary poem rather than a story with named events, following a figure called simply the Leader as he founds a settlement on...
What Shaped 1960
Roth was twenty six and the award made him immediately famous and immediately controversial, since some rabbis and readers accused the stories of handing ammunition to antisemites, an argument he would be having for the next fifty years. Drury's Washington novel about a confirmation fight was a bestseller in an election year that ended with Kennedy's win in November. In February four students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro and the sit in movement spread across the South within weeks.
Published in 1960, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1960 and took no major award.
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No major prizeRabbit, Run
Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a twenty six year old former high school basketball star now selling kitchen gadgets, walks out on his pregnant wife Janice...
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No major prizeThe Country Girls
Caithleen Cait Brady and her wilder, more confident friend Baba Brennan leave their convent school in rural Ireland for Dublin, each chasing a...