The year in prizes
1920 Book Award Winners
3 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
No fiction prize was awarded in 1920. Justin H. Smith won for The War with Mexico and Albert J. Beveridge for his life of John Marshall, while the Nobel went to Knut Hamsun for Growth of the Soil, a novel about a farmer clearing land in the far north of Norway.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The War with Mexico
Justin H. Smith spent decades after leaving his professorship at Dartmouth building this two volume account of the war Mexico and the United States...
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The Life of John Marshall
Albert J. Beveridge spent the years after leaving the Senate on a four volume life of John Marshall, the fourth chief justice, who took his seat on...
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Growth of the Soil
Isak walks alone into empty, unclaimed land in rural Norway and simply begins clearing it, building a turf hut, planting the first crops and...
What Shaped 1920
American women voted in a presidential election for the first time in November 1920, and Prohibition took effect in January. The Pulitzer jury named no novel at all, an early instance of a committee deciding that nothing published had met the standard. Hamsun won for a book arguing almost the opposite of everything the coming decade would be about, a hymn to soil and patient labor published just as the industrial world accelerated. His reputation would be permanently complicated two decades later by his support for the German occupation of his own country.
Published in 1920, 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.
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Curated selectionMain Street
Carol Milford, an idealistic young librarian from the city, marries country doctor Will Kennicott and moves to the small Minnesota town of Gopher...
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Curated selectionThis Side of Paradise
Amory Blaine drifts from a privileged, indulged Minnesota childhood through Princeton and a string of romances that never quite become what he...