1980 Book Award Winners
Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song, his account of the killer Gary Gilmore. William Golding won the Booker for Rites of Passage, Douglas R. Hofstadter took the non fiction prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Czesław Miłosz received the Nobel.
14 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
-
The Executioner's Song
Gary Gilmore comes out of federal prison in April 1976, aged thirty five, having spent most of his life inside, and goes to live with relatives in...
-
Rites of Passage
Edmund Talbot, young, aristocratic and pleased with himself, sails for Australia at the end of the Napoleonic wars to take up a colonial post...
-
Sophie's Choice
In a Brooklyn boarding house in 1947, a young southerner who wants to be a novelist falls in with the couple upstairs. Stingo is twenty two, broke...
-
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas R. Hofstadter set out to show what a mathematician, an artist and a composer have in common, and the book he built around that question...
-
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
Litwack asks a question that sounds simple and turns out to be enormous: what actually happened, day by day, when four million people stopped being...
-
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Edmund Morris's biography follows Theodore Roosevelt from a childhood so weakened by asthma that his father built him a home gymnasium and hired...
-
The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff is Tom Wolfe's account of the test pilots and the first astronauts, and of the unnamable quality the title gestures at, the blend...
-
Selected Poems
Selected Poems draws together two decades of Donald Justice's work, poems built around childhood memories of Miami, Florida, friends and teachers...
-
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...
-
Timescape
In 1998 the oceans are dying. A marine algal bloom is spreading, agriculture is failing behind it, and a physicist at Cambridge named John Renfrew...
-
The Rheingold Route
John Cochrane used to be a United States Treasury agent. He now lives in London under an assumed name, divorced, stranded and making a living as an...
-
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal
Presented as the actual diary of thirteen year old Catherine Hall, kept across roughly two years on a family farm in rural New Hampshire in the...
-
Ox-Cart Man
A New Hampshire farmer spends a year gathering what his family has grown and made, wool spun into yarn, a birch broom, shingles split by hand, a...
-
The Captive Mind
The Captive Mind is a work of analysis, not fiction, and its subject is a question Czesław Miłosz had watched play out among people he knew...
What Shaped 1980
Mailer called The Executioner's Song a true life novel and wrote a thousand pages in flat, plain sentences entirely unlike his usual voice, which is why it works. Hofstadter's book about consciousness, recursion and self reference became an unlikely bestseller and remains the strangest thing ever to win a Pulitzer. Miłosz, a Polish exile teaching in California, won as Solidarity was forming in the Gdansk shipyards, and his poems were printed and passed around Poland almost immediately.
Published in 1980, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1980 and took no major award.
-
No major prizeHousekeeping
Ruth narrates her own upbringing in the small, remote town of Fingerbone, Idaho, built beside a lake that once swallowed a passenger train and,...
-
No major prizeThe Clan of the Cave Bear
An earthquake orphans a five year old Cro Magnon girl in prehistoric Ice Age Europe, and after a cave lion leaves deep claw marks on her thigh, a...