1978 Book Award Winners
James Alan McPherson won the Pulitzer for Elbow Room, becoming the second Black writer to take the fiction prize. Iris Murdoch won the Booker for The Sea, the Sea, Carl Sagan took the non fiction Pulitzer for The Dragons of Eden, and Isaac Bashevis Singer received the Nobel.
14 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Elbow Room
Twelve stories about Black Americans in the years just after the legal barriers came down, when the question stopped being whether you were allowed...
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The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a celebrated theatre director, has retired from London to an isolated house on a northern cliff to eat simply, swim daily and...
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Blood Tie
Ceramos is a small port on the Turkish coast, an old sponge diving town starting its conversion into a resort, and the novel gathers into it a...
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The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan set out in The Dragons of Eden to explain how human intelligence actually evolved, pulling together anthropology, evolutionary biology,...
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The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. argues that modern American capitalism was built not primarily by market forces acting alone but by a new class of salaried...
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Samuel Johnson
Walter Jackson Bate's biography follows Samuel Johnson from a childhood in Lichfield marked by scrofula and near blindness in one eye, through...
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The Path Between the Seas
The Path Between the Seas tells the whole story of the Panama Canal, 1870 to 1914, and it is really two epics joined at a grave. The first is...
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Collected Poems
Collected Poems gathers several decades of Howard Nemerov's work into a single volume, poetry written almost entirely in fixed forms and meter at a...
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Gateway
The Heechee left. Nobody knows why, or where, or what they looked like. What they left behind is a hollowed asteroid parked near the sun containing...
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Dreamsnake
Snake is a healer on an Earth left broken by nuclear war, and she travels the desert with three serpents in a case. Grass, Mist and Sand are her...
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Catch Me: Kill Me
Boris Kotlikoff defected from the Soviet Union with nothing but his standing as a poet, which makes what happens to him senseless by every rule of...
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Bridge to Terabithia
Jess Aarons, an artistic, poor boy in rural Virginia who spends the summer training to be the fastest runner in his grade, is beaten in a race by...
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Noah's Ark
Peter Spier opens his retelling of the flood with his own translation of a short Dutch poem by the seventeenth century writer Jacobus Revius, sixty...
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The Family Moskat
The novel opens with Meshulam Moskat, an aging, wealthy patriarch presiding over a large, sprawling Jewish family in Warsaw, and follows that...
What Shaped 1978
Singer wrote in Yiddish for a readership that the Holocaust had largely destroyed, and his Nobel was in part a prize for a language. Sagan's win for a book about the evolution of human intelligence marked the moment popular science writing became prize territory, four years before Cosmos made him the most famous scientist in America. Katherine Paterson published Bridge to Terabithia that year and won the Newbery for it.
Published in 1978, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1978 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Cement Garden
Jack, fifteen and the novel's narrator, lives with his three siblings, older sister Julie, younger sister Sue, and much younger brother Tom, in a...
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No major prizeThe Stand
A strain of weaponized influenza, code named Captain Trips, escapes a secret military lab in the California desert after a containment breach, and...