Winners

What Shaped 1966

Porter was seventy six and had published fewer than thirty stories in forty years, which is a reminder that the prizes occasionally reward a slow perfectionist over a productive career. The Nobel that year went jointly to a German Jewish poet who had escaped to Sweden days before deportation and to a Hebrew novelist in Jerusalem, a pairing the Academy made deliberately. American troop numbers in Vietnam passed four hundred thousand, and the Cultural Revolution began in China.

Published in 1966, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1966 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

    On a November night in 1959, two ex convicts, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, break into the Kansas farmhouse of Herbert Clutter, a respected...

  • No major prize
    The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

    Oedipa Maas, a suburban California housewife, is named co executor of the sprawling estate of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, a real estate...

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