Winners

What Shaped 1963

The Snowy Day is the quiet landmark here: a picture book with a small Black boy as its hero, which was close to unheard of in American children's publishing, and which won the Caldecott and stayed in print forever. Tuchman's account of how Europe stumbled into war in 1914 was read closely in the Kennedy White House during the missile crisis. A quarter of a million people marched on Washington in August, and Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November.

Published in 1963, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1963 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

    A writer researching a book about the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima instead finds himself drawn into the lives of the three grown children...

  • No major prize
    The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

    Esther Greenwood, a talented college student who wins a coveted summer internship at a New York fashion magazine, arrives expecting the experience...

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