1969 Book Award Winners

Winners

• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

  Abel comes home to Walatowa in the summer of 1945 so drunk that he does not recognise his grandfather at the station. He has been at war in Europe,...

• The Booker Prize
  Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby

  Townrow is English, or possibly Irish, and is no longer certain which. He goes to Port Said in 1956 at the request of the widow of an old friend,...

• National Book Award for Fiction
  Steps by Jerzy Kosiński

  Steps has no plot, no names and no fixed country. It is a sequence of several dozen short episodes, some a paragraph, some a few pages, narrated by...

• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
  So Human an Animal by René Dubos

  René Dubos spent his working life as a microbiologist, the scientist who isolated tyrothricin and gramicidin from soil bacteria in 1939, among the...

• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
  The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

  Norman Mailer went to Washington in October 1967 to take part in the march on the Pentagon protesting the Vietnam War, and instead of simply...

• Pulitzer Prize for History
  Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination by Leonard W. Levy

  Leonard W. Levy traces the right against self incrimination from its earliest roots in medieval and early English courts, where the ecclesiastical...

• Pulitzer Prize for Biography
  The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends by Benjamin Lawrence Reid

  B. L. Reid's biography follows John Quinn from his 1870 birth in Tiffin, Ohio, the son of Irish immigrant parents, through the University of...

• National Book Award for Non-Fiction
  White Over Black by Winthrop D. Jordan

  White Over Black is a history of an idea: American attitudes toward Black people from the first English contacts with Africa in the 1550s to the...

• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
  Of Being Numerous by George Oppen

  Of Being Numerous takes its title from its long title poem, a sequence that asks what it means for a single person to exist as one of many, inside...

• Hugo Award for Best Novel
  Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

  The world of 2010 holds seven billion people, and Brunner's title comes from the calculation that they would just about fit, shoulder to shoulder,...

• Nebula Award for Best Novel
  The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Genly Ai is an envoy from a federation of worlds, sent alone to the planet Gethen to invite it to join. Gethen is in an ice age, its politics are...

• Edgar Award for Best Novel
  A Case of Need by Michael Crichton

  Karen Randall, seventeen, daughter of one of Boston medicine's dynastic families, bleeds to death after a botched abortion, and within hours the...

• Newbery Medal
  The High King by Lloyd Alexander

  Taran, once content to call himself only an Assistant Pig Keeper, returns home from his travels to learn that the Death Lord Arawn has seized...

• Caldecott Medal
  The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship by Uri Shulevitz

  Arthur Ransome's retelling, first collected in his 1916 book Old Peter's Russian Tales, follows the youngest of three brothers, dismissed by his...

• Nobel Prize in Literature
  Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

  Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a single bare tree on a country road for a man named Godot, who never comes, and Beckett gives them...

Published in 1969, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1969 and took no major award.

• No major prize
  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

  Billy Pilgrim is an American optometrist who has come unstuck in time, a condition that lets him slip without warning among the days of his own...

• No major prize
  The Godfather by Mario Puzo

  Vito Corleone, head of a New York crime family, survives an assassination attempt ordered by the rival narcotics trafficker Virgil Sollozzo, who...