1987 Book Award Winners
Penelope Lively won the Booker for Moon Tiger and Larry Heinemann took the National Book Award for Paco's Story. Rita Dove won the poetry Pulitzer for Thomas and Beulah, and the first Bram Stoker Awards were given, shared by Stephen King's Misery and Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song.
16 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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A Summons to Memphis
Phillip Carver is forty nine, an editor of rare books in New York, living with a younger woman he will not marry. His two unmarried sisters summon...
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Moon Tiger
Claudia Hampton is dying in a hospital bed, and the nurses have decided she is a confused old woman. She was a war correspondent, a popular...
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Paco's Story
Alpha Company died at Fire Base Harriette: ninety some men, annihilated in a single night's attack, and the novel is narrated by their ghosts, a...
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Arab and Jew
David K. Shipler spent years covering the Middle East for The New York Times, including a stretch as the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief, and he...
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Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
Bernard Bailyn built Voyagers to the West around a single remarkable source, the register of emigrants that the Lords of the Treasury required...
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Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
David J. Garrow's biography follows Martin Luther King Jr. through the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, built with...
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the definitive history of the invention that divided the twentieth century, told across nearly nine hundred pages...
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Thomas and Beulah
Thomas and Beulah tells the story of a marriage across two linked sequences of poems, one voiced from the perspective of Thomas, the other from...
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Speaker for the Dead
Three thousand years after Ender Wiggin destroyed an entire species, he is thirty five years old, kept young by relativistic travel, and works...
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The Falling Woman
Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist in her fifties with a reputation for unorthodox conclusions, a history of psychiatric hospitalisation after a...
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Misery
Paul Sheldon has just killed the goose that laid his golden eggs: in the manuscript riding beside him through a Colorado snowstorm, he has finally...
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Swan Song
The missiles fly early in McCammon's epic, and the book is everything after: America as a nuclear winter wasteland, crossed for seven years by...
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A Dark-Adapted Eye
Vera Hillyard was hanged. That fact stands at the novel's centre from the first pages, the family's unspeakable event, and the book is her niece...
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The Whipping Boy
Prince Horace, known to everyone as Prince Brat, is too well protected by his rank to ever be punished directly, so the palace keeps an orphan...
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Hey, Al
Al, a city janitor, and his dog Eddie share a cramped, dingy apartment they are both openly tired of, and when a huge, well spoken bird appears at...
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Less Than One
Less Than One gathers essays rather than telling a single story, and its real subject across all of them is what it costs, and what it clarifies,...
What Shaped 1987
Heinemann's win is remembered mostly for what it beat: Toni Morrison's Beloved was on the shortlist and lost, and the following January forty eight Black writers published an open letter in the New York Times protesting that Morrison had never received a major American award. Dove's Thomas and Beulah, telling her grandparents' lives in two sequences of short poems, made her the second Black writer to win the poetry Pulitzer. The Horror Writers Association gave its first awards that year.
Published in 1987, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1987 and took no major award.
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No major prizeNorwegian Wood
Toru Watanabe, now thirty seven and hearing an orchestral cover of the Beatles song Norwegian Wood on an airplane, is pulled back without warning...
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No major prizeThe Bonfire of the Vanities
Sherman McCoy, a wealthy Wall Street bond trader who privately calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn off a highway into the...