1968 Book Award Winners
William Styron won the Pulitzer for The Confessions of Nat Turner, told in the voice of the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion. Roger Zelazny took the Hugo for Lord of Light, and Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel.
13 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
-
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Nat Turner is in a cell in Jerusalem, Virginia, in November 1831, waiting to be hanged, and he tells the story himself. He was born into slavery in...
-
The Eighth Day
In Coaltown, Illinois, in the summer of 1902, Breckenridge Lansing is shot dead at rifle practice in his own garden, and his neighbour John Ashley,...
-
Rousseau and Revolution
Rousseau and Revolution is the tenth of the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, the series Will Durant began in 1935 and later shared with...
-
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn built The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution out of an introduction he had written two years earlier for a documentary...
-
Memoirs
George Kennan's Memoirs is his own account of the twenty five years, 1925 to 1950, that took him from a young Foreign Service officer to the...
-
Memoirs (1925-1950)
George F. Kennan's Memoirs is that rare thing, a statesman's autobiography that is also a work of literature, and it may be the best book ever...
-
The Hard Hours
The Hard Hours is Anthony Hecht's second collection, the book in which he finally confronted, in verse, what he had witnessed as a twenty two year...
-
Lord of Light
The crew of a colony ship reached a new world, subdued its native energy beings, and then declined to share their technology with the descendants...
-
Rite of Passage
Earth was destroyed in 2041 by its own overpopulation, and the survivors are divided between a handful of enormous generation ships built from...
-
God Save the Mark
Fred Fitch is the most swindled man in New York. Con artists cross the street to find him; he has bought shares in nonexistent uranium, subscribed...
-
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Frustrated with what she considers the injustice and monotony of life as the oldest, most responsible child in her suburban Connecticut family,...
-
Drummer Hoff
Barbara Emberley builds the text as a cumulative rhyme, the kind that keeps stacking one new detail onto the last until the whole thing fires at...
-
Snow Country
Shimamura is a wealthy, idle Tokyo man who travels repeatedly across the mountains to a remote hot spring town, drawn back each time to Komako, a...
What Shaped 1968
Styron's novel provoked one of the fiercest literary arguments of the century. A group of Black writers published a book of responses attacking a white Southerner for appropriating Nat Turner's voice and distorting his life, and the debate over who may write whose story has never really closed since. The year around it was one of the worst in modern American history: the Tet Offensive in January, Martin Luther King killed in April, Robert Kennedy in June, and Soviet tanks in Prague in August.
Published in 1968, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1968 and took no major award.
-
No major prize2001: A Space Odyssey
The novel opens three million years in the past, where a mysterious alien monolith appears among a group of starving prehuman hominids and nudges...
-
No major prizeDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter in a San Francisco left largely emptied by nuclear war, is assigned to track down and retire six escaped Nexus-6...