1981 Book Award Winners
John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer for A Confederacy of Dunces, eleven years after his death. Salman Rushdie won the Booker for Midnight's Children, and Elias Canetti received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
14 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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A Confederacy of Dunces
Ignatius J. Reilly is thirty, enormous, educated far past any use he can make of it, and lives with his mother on Constantinople Street in New...
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Midnight's Children
Saleem Sinai is born in Bombay at the exact stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment India becomes independent, and is therefore handcuffed...
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Plains Song: For Female Voices
Cora comes west from Ohio at the turn of the century to marry Emerson Atkins, a Nebraska homesteader she barely knows, and on her wedding night she...
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Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Carl E. Schorske's study of Vienna at the turn of the century argues that the city's brief, particular kind of political collapse produced an...
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American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876
American Education: The National Experience, 1783 to 1876 is the second volume of Lawrence Cremin's three volume history of American education,...
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Peter the Great: His Life and World
Robert K. Massie's biography follows Peter the Great from a childhood scarred by the streltsy revolt of 1682, when soldiers loyal to his half...
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China Men
China Men is Maxine Hong Kingston's book of the fathers, the companion to The Woman Warrior she originally conceived as half of one work, and it...
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The Morning of the Poem
The Morning of the Poem takes its shape from a single long poem that fills most of the book, a day by day record James Schuyler kept from his...
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The Snow Queen
Tiamat is a water world locked in a cycle. For one hundred and fifty years the offworlders come, running the planet through a black hole gate and...
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The Claw of the Conciliator
The second volume of The Book of the New Sun, and it cannot be read first. Severian is a journeyman of the guild of torturers, exiled from his...
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Whip Hand
Sid Halley was champion jockey until a fall and a horse's hooves destroyed his left hand, and the melancholy engineering of his life since, a...
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Jacob Have I Loved
On the small fictional Chesapeake Bay island of Rass during the nineteen forties, Sara Louise Bradshaw, called Wheeze, has spent her whole life...
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Fables
Fables gathers twenty short animal stories Arnold Lobel invented himself rather than adapted from any older tradition, each one running a single...
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Auto-da-Fé
Peter Kien is a reclusive sinologist in Vienna who loves his twenty five thousand book library more than he loves any living person, and the whole...
What Shaped 1981
Toole killed himself in 1969 after failing to place his novel, and his mother spent the following decade pressing the manuscript on anyone who would read it until the novelist Walker Percy finally did. The Pulitzer went to a book that had been rejected everywhere. Rushdie's Midnight's Children, tying a boy's life to India's independence, was later voted the best of all Booker winners twice over, and it made a generation of postcolonial novelists possible. The first cases of what became AIDS were reported in June.
Published in 1981, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1981 and took no major award.
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No major prizeRed Dragon
Will Graham, a former FBI profiler whose gift for entering a killer's mind cost him his nerve and nearly his life when he caught the psychiatrist...
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No major prizeThe Hotel New Hampshire
Win Berry, a genial dreamer who never stops chasing an idea despite ordinary evidence against it, drags his wife Mary and their five children from...