The year in prizes

1921 Book Award Winners

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

Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence and became the first woman to take the fiction prize. Anatole France won the Nobel, and Edward Bok's account of his own rise from Dutch immigrant boy to magazine editor took the biography award.

Winners

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

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Newland Archer is a young lawyer of old New York in the 1870s, newly engaged to May Welland, who is lovely, correct and exactly what his world...
Pulitzer Prize for History

The Victory at Sea by William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick
The Victory at Sea tells William Sowden Sims's own account of commanding American naval forces in European waters during the First World War,...
Pulitzer Prize for Biography

The Americanization of Edward Bok by Edward Bok
Edward Bok tells his own American story in the third person, following a Dutch boy who arrived in Brooklyn at six years old, when his father's...
Nobel Prize in Literature

Penguin Island by Anatole France
A short sighted, elderly missionary named Mael sets out from Brittany in a small stone boat, rigged and launched, he believes, by a helpful monk...

What Shaped 1921

Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence looking back at the New York of the 1870s from a Europe still counting its war dead, and the distance is the point: a society of rigid manners seen from a world that had just proved how quickly such things vanish. The prize made her the first woman to win for fiction, though the jury had actually chosen Sinclair Lewis and was overruled. America in 1921 was in a sharp recession, closing its doors to immigration, and settling into the isolation that would define the decade.

Published in 1921, 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

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
Denis Stone, a young poet, spends a summer at a country house party at Crome, mostly failing to say the right thing to Anne Wimbush, his hostess's...
Curated selection

Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos
Dos Passos follows three American soldiers of very different backgrounds through the First World War, letting the army itself, rather than the...