1990 Book Award Winners
Oscar Hijuelos won the Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and became the first Latino writer to take the fiction prize. A. S. Byatt won the Booker for Possession, Charles R. Johnson took the National Book Award for Middle Passage, and Octavio Paz received the Nobel.
16 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Cesar and Nestor Castillo arrive in New York from Havana in 1949 and form a band. Cesar sings, drinks, and pursues every woman in the borough with...
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Possession
Roland Mitchell is an underemployed academic working on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. In a library copy of a book Ash owned, he finds two...
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Middle Passage
Rutherford Calhoun is a freed slave, a practiced petty thief and an accomplished liar, at large in New Orleans in 1830 and enjoying it thoroughly...
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And Their Children After Them
In the summer of 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans lived among three tenant farming families in Alabama and turned what they saw into...
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In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines
Stanley Karnow's In Our Image traces almost half a century of American rule in the Philippines, from the islands' transfer from Spain after the war...
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Machiavelli in Hell
Sebastian de Grazia's biography follows Niccolo Machiavelli from his 1469 birth in Florence, the son of an attorney, through his sudden and still...
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The House of Morgan
The House of Morgan is the story of American finance told through its most powerful name, a history of the Morgan banking empire from its Victorian...
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The Emperor's New Mind
Penrose's title announces the target: the confident claim of 1980s artificial intelligence that the mind is software, and that machines running the...
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The World Doesn't End
The World Doesn't End gathers short prose poems, most no longer than a paragraph, each one a small, self contained scene rather than a poem broken...
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Hyperion
Seven pilgrims travel to the world of Hyperion, to the Time Tombs, which are moving backward through time, and to the Shrike, a three metre...
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Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
Tenar, who was a priestess of the Tombs of Atuan as a girl and left with Ged and the ring, did not become a wizard or a queen. She married a farmer...
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Mine
Mary Terror was Mary Terrell once, a true believer in the Storm Front Brigade, a Weather Underground styled cell whose bombs and communiqués ended...
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Black Cherry Blues
Dave Robicheaux is a widower now, running a bait dock south of New Iberia, raising the little Salvadoran girl he pulled from a drowned plane and...
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Number the Stars
Ten year old Annemarie Johansen is living in Nazi occupied Copenhagen in 1943 when her best friend Ellen Rosen, who is Jewish, is put in real...
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Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China
When a mother leaves her three daughters, Shang, Tao, and Paotze, alone at home to visit their own grandmother, a wolf disguises himself as that...
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The Labyrinth of Solitude
The Labyrinth of Solitude is a book of essays, not a story, and it opens with Octavio Paz's own governing claim: that solitude is the deepest fact...
What Shaped 1990
Byatt's Possession is two love stories at once, a Victorian one recovered through letters and a modern one between the scholars recovering them, and it did what few literary novels manage by being both a prizewinner and a genuine bestseller. Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in February 1990 after twenty seven years, and Germany reunified in October. Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, about a Danish girl helping her Jewish friend escape, won the Newbery.
Published in 1990, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1990 and took no major award.
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No major prizeJurassic Park
A biotechnology company has recovered dinosaur DNA from insects preserved in amber, filled the gaps, and built a theme park on an island off Costa...
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No major prizeThe Things They Carried
Twenty two linked stories follow the platoon Alpha Company through Vietnam, narrated largely by a character named Tim O'Brien who deliberately...