1975 Book Award Winners
Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer for The Killer Angels, his novel of Gettysburg told from inside the commanders' heads. Annie Dillard won the non fiction prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at twenty nine, and Robert Caro took the biography award for The Power Broker.
15 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Killer Angels
Four days at Gettysburg, told from inside the heads of the men making the decisions, alternating chapter by chapter between the two armies. On the...
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Heat and Dust
Two women, fifty years apart, in the same small Indian town. In 1923 Olivia is the bored and childless wife of a British civil officer in Satipur,...
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Dog Soldiers
Saigon, near the end. John Converse, a failed playwright working as a war correspondent, has seen enough of Vietnam to conclude that in a world...
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The Hair of Harold Roux
Aaron Benham is a literature professor at a New Hampshire college, on leave to write a novel and not writing it. Across one long weekend in the...
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard spent a year watching the creek near her home in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and turned...
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Jefferson and His Time
Dumas Malone spent decades on Jefferson and His Time, a biography so large it eventually filled six volumes, following Thomas Jefferson from his...
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert Caro's The Power Broker follows Robert Moses from a comfortable Connecticut childhood and an education at Yale and at Oxford into New York's...
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The Life of Emily Dickinson
Richard Sewall spent more than twenty years on The Life of Emily Dickinson, and the book's method is its genius: knowing that the poet left almost...
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Turtle Island
Turtle Island takes its title from a name for the North American continent drawn from Native American tradition, and Gary Snyder uses that renaming...
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The Dispossessed
Anarres is a dry moon settled a hundred and seventy years ago by anarchists who were given a barren world to leave the rich one alone. There is no...
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The Forever War
William Mandella is conscripted under an elite draft that takes the most educated young people on Earth and sends them to fight the Taurans, an...
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Peter's Pence
The plan, as pitched inside an IRA splinter cell, has a mad elegance: rob the Vatican. Peter's Pence, the faithful's annual offering to Rome, plus...
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M. C. Higgins, the Great
Mayo Cornelius Higgins, known to everyone as M.C., lives with his family on Sarah's Mountain in Appalachia, spending much of his time perched on a...
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Arrow to the Sun
Gerald McDermott adapts a Pueblo creation story, drawn from Acoma Pueblo tradition, about a boy born when the Lord of the Sun sends a spark of life...
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Cuttlefish Bones
Montale's first collection, published in Italian in 1925, and still the book most readers meet him through. The setting is the Ligurian coast...
What Shaped 1975
Caro's thousand page account of how Robert Moses reshaped New York without ever winning an election is the definitive American book about unelected power, and it began a career he is still completing. Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a year of close attention to one Virginia creek, and it made nature writing a serious literary form again for a generation of readers. Saigon fell in April 1975 and the Vietnam War ended.
Published in 1975, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1975 and took no major award.
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No major prize'Salem's Lot
Writer Ben Mears returns to the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, after twenty five years away, drawn back by memories of the Marsten House, a...
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No major prizeThe Female Man
Four women, versions of the same person split across parallel timelines, meet and clash across the length of the novel. Janet Evason comes from...