1998 Book Award Winners
Philip Roth won the Pulitzer for American Pastoral. Ian McEwan won the Booker for Amsterdam, Jared Diamond took both the Pulitzer and the Royal Society Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel, and José Saramago received the Nobel.
18 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
-
American Pastoral
Seymour Levov, called the Swede for his blond hair, was the athletic god of Weequahic High in Jewish Newark in the 1940s. He marries a former Miss...
-
Amsterdam
Two old friends meet at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman they both once loved. Clive Linley is a celebrated composer at work on a symphony...
-
Charming Billy
The novel opens in a bar in the Bronx after a funeral, forty seven mourners at long tables telling stories about Billy Lynch, and every story is...
-
Larry's Party
Larry Weller is a Winnipeg florist, an ordinary man by every available measure, and on his 1978 honeymoon he walks into the hedge maze at Hampton...
-
Guns, Germs, and Steel
On a beach in New Guinea in 1972, a local politician named Yali asked Diamond a question that took him twenty five years to answer: why did white...
-
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Edward J. Larson's history of the 1925 Scopes trial begins with a publicity stunt. Dayton, Tennessee was a struggling town, and local businessman...
-
Personal History
This is Katharine Graham's own account of becoming, almost by accident, one of the most powerful newspaper publishers in America. Graham describes...
-
Slaves in the Family
Edward Ball grew up on the family joke, never talk about the slaves, and Slaves in the Family is the book he wrote by breaking the rule. The Balls...
-
Guns, Germs, and Steel
On a beach in New Guinea in 1972, a local politician named Yali asked Diamond a question that took him twenty five years to answer: why did white...
-
Black Zodiac
Black Zodiac sets Charles Wright's adopted home in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia against two very different literary traditions critics have...
-
Birthday Letters
Birthday Letters is the most famous book of poems published in Britain in the last half century, and its story is inseparable from its content:...
-
Forever Peace
In 2043 the United States fights its wars with soldierboys: armoured remote units controlled by soldiers jacked in from a bunker near the front,...
-
Forever Peace
In 2043 the United States fights its wars with soldierboys: armoured remote units controlled by soldiers jacked in from a bunker near the front,...
-
Bag of Bones
Mike Noonan is a bestselling novelist whose wife Jo drops dead of an aneurysm in a drugstore parking lot, four years before the book begins,...
-
Cimarron Rose
Billy Bob Holland practises law in Deaf Smith, Texas, hill country between the pines and the hardscrabble, and carries the double load Burke builds...
-
Out of the Dust
Billie Jo Kelby is fourteen and living through the worst of the Dust Bowl on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma in 1934 and 1935, and Hesse tells...
-
Rapunzel
Paul O. Zelinsky retells the Brothers Grimm version of the old tale: a couple trades their unborn daughter to a sorceress in exchange for stolen...
-
Blindness
A man waiting at a red light suddenly goes blind, not into darkness but into a featureless white, and the affliction spreads through the unnamed...
What Shaped 1998
American Pastoral, about a man whose daughter bombs a post office in protest at Vietnam, opened the late run of novels that made Roth's last decades his best. Diamond's argument that geography rather than culture explains why some societies conquered others was read everywhere and argued with by historians ever since. Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, breaking a thirty five year silence about Sylvia Plath, and won the T.S. Eliot Prize months before his death.
Published in 1998, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1998 and took no major award.
-
No major prizeAbout a Boy
Will Freeman, thirty six, lives entirely off the royalties from a single Christmas novelty song his father wrote decades earlier and has arranged...
-
No major prizeThe Poisonwood Bible
Nathan Price, a fierce Baptist missionary, moves his wife Orleanna and four daughters, Rachel, twins Leah and Adah, and young Ruth May, from...