1984 Book Award Winners
William Kennedy won the Pulitzer for Ironweed, Anita Brookner won the Booker for Hotel du Lac, and William Gibson took the Nebula for Neuromancer. Mary Oliver won the poetry Pulitzer for American Primitive.
13 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Ironweed
Francis Phelan comes back to Albany at Halloween in 1938, twenty two years after he ran. He had been a major league third baseman. He left because...
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Hotel du Lac
Edith Hope writes romantic fiction under a pen name and has been sent away to a quiet hotel on Lake Geneva at the end of the season, by friends, in...
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Victory over Japan
Fourteen stories, mostly monologues, from the women of Gilchrist's South: New Orleans uptown, Mississippi delta, Arkansas hill country, all of them...
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The Social Transformation of American Medicine
Paul Starr traces how American doctors went from a scattered, often distrusted trade in the nineteenth century to one of the most authoritative...
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Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915
Louis R. Harlan's second volume on Booker T. Washington picks up in 1901, the year Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech had already made him the...
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Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy
This is the crowning volume of Robert Remini's three volume life of Andrew Jackson, the fullest biography of the seventh president ever written,...
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American Primitive
American Primitive gathers poems built almost entirely out of close attention to the natural world, the woods, ponds, and shoreline around...
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Startide Rising
The Streaker is the first starship crewed mostly by uplifted dolphins, with seven humans and one chimpanzee aboard, and it has found something in a...
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Neuromancer
Case was a console cowboy, a thief who jacked his nervous system into the global data network and stole from corporations. He cheated the wrong...
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LaBrava
Joe LaBrava used to guard presidents; now he photographs South Miami Beach, the art deco hotels full of retirees, hustlers and heat, and his...
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Dear Mr. Henshaw
Sixth grader Leigh Botts starts writing to Boyd Henshaw, his favorite author, as a school assignment, irritated at first by the author's playful...
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The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot
The Glorious Flight tells the true story of Louis Bleriot, a French inventor whose fascination with powered flight leads him through years of...
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The Plague Column
The Plague Column is a poetry collection built around one central image, the baroque monument that stands in Prague to commemorate the dead of a...
What Shaped 1984
Neuromancer arrived in the year Orwell had made famous and described a different future entirely: corporate, networked and lived partly inside a space Gibson called cyberspace, a word he had coined and which the actual internet then adopted. Kennedy's Ironweed had been rejected by thirteen publishers before Saul Bellow intervened on its behalf. Apple introduced the Macintosh in January, and Mary Oliver began the ascent that made her the bestselling American poet of her generation.
Published in 1984, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1984 and took no major award.
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No major prizeMoney
John Self, a wealthy but permanently drunk and self loathing advertising director, is summoned to New York by the producer Fielding Goodney to...
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No major prizeThe Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tomas, a Prague surgeon who treats fidelity as a kind of imprisonment, moves through a long string of affairs organized around what he calls erotic...