1979 Book Award Winners
John Cheever won the Pulitzer for his collected Stories, Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker for Offshore, and Tim O'Brien took the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato.
14 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Stories of John Cheever
More than sixty stories in the order he wrote them, from the late 1940s to the 1970s, covering the same ground so consistently that reading them...
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Offshore
A handful of people live on old barges moored at Battersea Reach on the Thames in the early 1960s, neither properly on land nor properly at sea,...
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Going After Cacciato
Cacciato, a round faced, dim, sweet natured private, walks away from the war. He leaves a note, more or less: gone to Paris. On the map it is some...
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On Human Nature
Edward Wilson had already provoked a furious scientific and public argument with his 1975 book Sociobiology, which applied evolutionary theory to...
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The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics
Don E. Fehrenbacher devotes his own Pulitzer winning book to the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott versus Sandford, the case that denied...
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Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews
Leonard Baker's biography follows Leo Baeck from his ordination as a rabbi in Germany and his rise, on the strength of his 1905 book The Essence of...
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The Snow Leopard
In the fall of 1973 Peter Matthiessen set out on a 250 mile walk into Dolpo, the Tibetan plateau country of northwest Nepal, with the field...
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Now and Then
Now and Then: Poems 1976 to 1978 collects Robert Penn Warren's late poems, work written in his seventies that circles back repeatedly to memory,...
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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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The Fountains of Paradise
Vannevar Morgan built the longest bridge on Earth and now wants to build something considerably harder: a tower from the equator to geostationary...
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Eye of the Needle
British intelligence calls him Die Nadel, the Needle, for the stiletto that is his signature: Henry Faber, the Reich's best agent in England, a...
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The Westing Game
Sixteen unlikely heirs, from a Polish immigrant dressmaker to a teenage bookie to a judge on the rise, are summoned to the newly opened Sunset...
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The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses
A girl who feels closer to the horses than to her own village people goes out with the rest of her camp on a hunt, and when a thunderstorm sends...
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The Axion Esti
This is a long poem, published in 1959, built in three parts, Genesis, The Passion and The Gloria, that take their titles and their shape from...
What Shaped 1979
O'Brien's novel about a soldier who walks away from the war and towards Paris was among the first major American novels to find a form for Vietnam, and he would keep circling the same material for the rest of his career. Cheever's Stories sold in numbers almost unheard of for short fiction and won everything available. The Iranian revolution began in January 1979, the hostage crisis started in November, and the accident at Three Mile Island in March ended American enthusiasm for nuclear power.
Published in 1979, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1979 and took no major award.
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No major prizeKindred
Dana Franklin, a young Black writer settling into a new house in 1976 Los Angeles with her white husband Kevin, is pulled without warning back to a...
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No major prizeThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur Dent wakes to find bulldozers about to flatten his house for a bypass, and before he can finish complaining about it Earth itself is...