The year in prizes
1922 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Booth Tarkington won a second Pulitzer for Alice Adams. The Newbery Medal was awarded for the first time, going to Hendrik Willem van Loon for The Story of Mankind, and Edwin Arlington Robinson took the poetry prize for his Collected Poems.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Alice Adams
Alice Adams is twenty two, pretty, quick, and on the wrong side of the invisible line that divides her unnamed midland city. Her father Virgil is a...
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The Founding of New England
The Founding of New England is the first volume in James Truslow Adams's three part history of New England, tracing the region from its earliest...
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
Hamlin Garland continues the family memoir he began with A Son of the Middle Border, the 1917 volume that made his hardscrabble prairie childhood...
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Collected Poems
This 1921 Collected Poems gathers the work Edwin Arlington Robinson had published across roughly three decades into a single volume, and it was the...
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The Story of Mankind
Van Loon opens his history of the world with the test he says he built the whole book on: an event or a person earns a place in it only if the...
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The Bonds of Interest
Two travelers arrive penniless in an unnamed city that answers to nobody but money: crafty, worldly Crispin and his young master Leandro, who has...
What Shaped 1922
1922 is the year modernism arrived in force. Joyce published Ulysses in Paris in February and Eliot published The Waste Land in October, and neither came near an American prize. The juries instead honored Tarkington's realism and Robinson's formal verse, which is the gap between what wins prizes and what changes literature, visible in a single year. The Newbery Medal began that year as the first award anywhere for children's books, created by a librarian who argued that writing for children deserved the same serious attention as writing for adults.
Published in 1922, 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 selectionSiddhartha
A Brahmin's son named Siddhartha leaves his father's house to seek enlightenment, first as a wandering ascetic with the Samanas and then, briefly,...
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Curated selectionUlysses
Advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, his ordinary errands, a funeral, a...