The year in prizes
1926 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Sinclair Lewis won the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith and refused it, calling the prize a threat to the independence of American writers. Harvey Cushing took the biography award for his life of the physician William Osler, and Grazia Deledda won the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Arrowsmith
Martin Arrowsmith is a doctor's apprentice from a small Winnemac town who catches, at medical school, the one incurable infection in the book: the...
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A History of the United States, Vol. VI: The War for Southern Independence (1849–1865)
Edward Channing's A History of the United States reached its sixth volume in 1925, two decades after the first appeared and short of the eight...
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The Life of Sir William Osler
Harvey Cushing, himself a pioneering brain surgeon, spent years assembling this two volume life of William Osler, the physician he counted as...
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What's O'Clock
What's O'Clock appeared in 1925, published just after Amy Lowell's death that May, and it gathers work from across the final phase of her career...
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Shen of the Sea
Arthur Bowie Chrisman invents sixteen short stories written in the manner of Chinese folktales rather than translating any existing ones, each...
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Reeds in the Wind
On the island of Sardinia, three unmarried sisters, Ruth, Ester and Noemi Pintor, live out a slow, genteel poverty in the crumbling house their...
What Shaped 1926
Lewis's refusal was the loudest thing that happened to the prize in its first decade. He argued that awards teach writers to be safe, and that a novelist writing to please a committee has already lost, then accepted the Nobel four years later without apparent difficulty. Arrowsmith itself is about a research scientist trying to keep his integrity against commercial and institutional pressure, so the gesture at least matched the book. Cushing, a pioneering brain surgeon, wrote his biography of Osler as one doctor's tribute to another and won for it.
Published in 1926, 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 selectionThe Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman living in Paris, was left sexually incapable by a wound from the First World War, a fact he can only ever...
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Curated selectionWinnie-the-Pooh
In the Hundred Acre Wood, a bear named Winnie the Pooh spends his days visiting friends, hunting for honey, and getting stuck in the occasional...