The year in prizes
1923 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Willa Cather won the Pulitzer for One of Ours, her novel about a Nebraska farm boy who finds meaning in the trenches of France. W. B. Yeats took the Nobel, and Edna St. Vincent Millay won the poetry prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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One of Ours
Claude Wheeler is the middle son of a prosperous Nebraska farm family, and nothing in his life fits him. His father is genially contemptuous, his...
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The Supreme Court in United States History
Charles Warren's three volume The Supreme Court in United States History traces the Court from its founding under the Constitution through the...
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The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
Burton Hendrick built this biography around Walter Hines Page's own wartime correspondence, letters written from the American embassy in London...
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The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
The 1923 Pulitzer went to Edna St. Vincent Millay for a group of three works taken together rather than one single book: the title poem The Ballad...
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The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
Tommy Stubbins, a shoemaker's son in the English west country, patches up an injured squirrel and finds himself apprenticed to John Dolittle, a...
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The Tower
This is a poetry collection, not a novel, so there is no plot to summarize, only what its poems set out to do and where they do it. Yeats had...
What Shaped 1923
Cather's novel divided readers precisely because of what it dared to suggest, that the war gave a stifled young man a life worth having, and Hemingway was among those who scorned it. She won anyway, and the argument it started about how to write the war ran for years. Yeats received his Nobel months after the Irish Free State came into being, and the Swedish Academy said as much, honoring a poet who had given a new nation a voice. Millay was writing the frankest verse about women's lives that American poetry had yet rewarded.
Published in 1923, 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 selectionCane
Toomer builds Cane out of short prose sketches, poems, and a closing dramatic piece called Kabnis rather than a single continuous plot, moving in...
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Curated selectionThe Prophet
A prophet named Almustafa has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, waiting on the hill outside its walls for the ship that will carry him...