The year in prizes
1925 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 3 notable books from our curated collection
Edna Ferber won the Pulitzer for So Big, the story of a widow raising a son on a truck farm outside Chicago. George Bernard Shaw took the Nobel for a body of work that included Saint Joan, and Charles Finger's Tales from Silver Lands won the Newbery Medal.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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So Big
Selina Peake is raised on her gambler father's philosophy that life is a grand adventure, and when he is killed she takes the only respectable work...
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History of the American Frontier
Frederic L. Paxson took up the subject that had defined his predecessor at the University of Wisconsin, where he succeeded Frederick Jackson Turner...
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Barrett Wendell and His Letters
M. A. De Wolfe Howe builds his life of Barrett Wendell around Wendell's own correspondence, weaving biographical narrative between long stretches...
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The Man Who Died Twice
The Man Who Died Twice is a single long narrative poem centered on Fernando Nash, a once promising composer whose early gift for music never found...
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Tales from Silver Lands
Charles Finger gathers nineteen folktales he collected while traveling and working across Central and South America, retelling stories that came to...
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Saint Joan
Shaw dramatizes Joan of Arc's short public life across six scenes and an epilogue, and he refuses from the first scene to make her either a mystic...
What Shaped 1925
The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925 and won nothing at all, selling modestly and leaving Fitzgerald convinced he had failed. The prizes went instead to Ferber's story of unglamorous endurance, which was closer to how most Americans actually lived than anything in Gatsby's Long Island. That summer the Scopes trial in Tennessee put the teaching of evolution in a courtroom and turned a local prosecution into a national argument about science, faith and who decides what children learn.
Published in 1925, 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 selectionMrs Dalloway
Clarissa Dalloway spends a single June day in London in 1923 preparing to host a party that evening, moving from a morning errand buying flowers...
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Curated selectionThe Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway rents a small house on Long Island next to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a man of mysterious wealth who throws lavish parties every...
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Curated selectionThe Trial
Bank official Josef K. wakes on the morning of his thirtieth birthday to find two agents in his rented room, informing him he is under arrest,...