Fond Books

The year in prizes

1918 Book Award Winners

4 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection

Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for His Family, a novel about a widower and his three daughters in a New York that will not stay still. Sara Teasdale took the poetry prize for Love Songs, and James Ford Rhodes was honored for his history of the Civil War.

Winners

In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.

What Shaped 1918

The war ended in November 1918 and the influenza pandemic that came with it killed more people than the fighting had. The first fiction prize went to a quiet domestic novel rather than anything about the trenches, which was true of most American writing that year. The literature of the war arrived a decade later, when the men who fought it had found the distance to write. Rhodes and his Civil War volumes speak to the other preoccupation of the moment, a country still explaining its worst conflict to itself more than fifty years on.

Published in 1918, never won a Pulitzer or Booker

These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.

  • Curated selection
    My Ántonia by Willa Cather

    Narrator Jim Burden, orphaned and sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie, recalls his childhood friendship with Antonia...

  • Curated selection
    The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

    Captain Chris Baldry returns from the trenches of the Western Front shell shocked and missing fifteen years of memory, believing himself still a...

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