The year in prizes
1917 Book Award Winners
3 prize categories represented
The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, and no novel was thought worthy of one. Jean Jules Jusserand took the inaugural history prize for With Americans of Past and Present Days, and the Nobel was divided between two Danes, Henrik Pontoppidan and Karl Gjellerup.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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With Americans of Past and Present Days
With Americans of Past and Present Days collects essays by Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States, tracing the historical...
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Julia Ward Howe
Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, two of Julia Ward Howe's six children, built this joint biography of their mother's long public life, and...
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Lucky Per
Per Sidenius grows up the son of a strict provincial pastor and rejects that inheritance almost entirely, leaving home determined to remake himself...
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The Pilgrim Kamanita
Kamanita, the son of a wealthy merchant in ancient India, falls in love with Vasitthi, a woman he cannot marry because of a family feud between...
What Shaped 1917
America entered the First World War in April 1917, and the prizes founded that spring belonged to a country suddenly looking outward. Joseph Pulitzer had left money to Columbia University for awards in journalism and letters, and the first winners show what a wartime jury valued: a French ambassador writing on the long friendship between his country and America, and a biography of the abolitionist campaigner Julia Ward Howe. In Stockholm the Swedish Academy split its prize between two writers from a neutral nation, which was a statement of its own in a year when most of Europe was fighting.