The year in prizes

1919 Book Award Winners

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

Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer for The Magnificent Ambersons, his portrait of a Midwestern dynasty undone by the motor car. Henry Adams took the biography prize after his death for The Education of Henry Adams, and the poetry citation was shared between Carl Sandburg's Cornhuskers and Margaret Widdemer's The Old Road to Paradise.

Winners

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

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
The Ambersons are the grandest family in a midland town that is recognizably Indianapolis, and George Amberson Minafer is their only grandchild,...
Pulitzer Prize for Biography

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Henry Adams, grandson and great grandson of two presidents, tells his own life story in the third person, watching a character named Henry Adams...
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg
Cornhuskers is Carl Sandburg's second major collection, published in 1918 while he was still working as a Chicago journalist, and it widens the...
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

The Old Road to Paradise by Margaret Widdemer
The Old Road to Paradise is Margaret Widdemer's second collection of poems, published by Henry Holt in 1918 while the First World War was still...
Nobel Prize in Literature

Olympian Spring by Carl Spitteler
Olympian Spring imagines the Greek gods before they are gods at all, still living in the underworld and only beginning their journey up toward...

What Shaped 1919

1919 was a year of aftermath. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June, American soldiers came home to a country they did not recognize, and the summer brought labor strikes and racial violence on a scale that shocked the nation. Tarkington's novel and Adams's memoir tell the same story from opposite ends of a life: an old order giving way to industrial modernity, watched by people who cannot slow it down. Both won because that was what Americans were living through, and neither pretends the change is comfortable.

Published in 1919, 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

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
A conventional London stockbroker named Charles Strickland abandons his wife, children, and career at forty with no warning and almost no...
Curated selection

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
A cycle of interconnected stories set in a fictional small Ohio town follows an assortment of lonely, thwarted residents, whom Anderson names...