The year in prizes
1924 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Robert Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for New Hampshire. Margaret Wilson took the fiction award for The Able McLaughlins, and Michael I. Pupin won in biography for From Immigrant to Inventor, the story of his journey from a Serbian village to a Columbia physics laboratory.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Able McLaughlins
The McLaughlins are Scottish Covenanters farming the Iowa prairie in the 1860s, a psalm singing clan of brothers and cousins thick enough to fill a...
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The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation
Charles Howard McIlwain's The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation argues that the break between the colonies and Britain grew out...
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From Immigrant to Inventor
Michael Pupin begins his autobiography with a boy from the small Serb village of Idvor, then on the Austrian Empire's military frontier and now in...
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New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
New Hampshire, published in full as New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, is built around a single long title poem that Robert Frost...
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The Dark Frigate
Set in seventeenth century England, Philip Marsham loses his father and his position in London after an accident forces him to flee, so he walks to...
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The Peasants
The novel follows one year in the Polish village of Lipce, opening in autumn as the harvest comes in and running through winter, spring and summer...
What Shaped 1924
Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 that spring, sharply restricting arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and barring most Asian immigration outright. Pupin's prize winning account of exactly the ascent the new law was designed to prevent appeared in the same year, and the coincidence says more about the period than either book could alone. Frost's New Hampshire, meanwhile, gave America a poet who sounded plain and rural while writing some of the most controlled verse of the century, a combination that made him the closest thing the country had to a national poet.
Published in 1924, 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 selectionA Passage to India
Adela Quested arrives in British India newly engaged to the city magistrate Ronny Heaslop, eager to see the real India rather than the version...
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Curated selectionThe Magic Mountain
Hans Castorp, a young engineer with no particular convictions of his own, travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps to visit his...