Won more than one prize

Books That Won Both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award

16 books, 1954 to 2025

Sixteen books have won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the two most closely watched prizes in American letters. Different bodies decide them on different calendars, the National Book Award in November and the Pulitzer the following May, so a book that takes both has survived a full year of second reading rather than one jury's enthusiasm. Seven of the sixteen are fiction, running from The Fixer and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter through The Color Purple and The Known World to The Underground Railroad and, most recently, James. The other nine are history, biography and reporting, among them The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Embracing Defeat. Bruce Catton opens the run with A Stillness at Appomattox in 1954.