The year in prizes
1927 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Louis Bromfield won the Pulitzer for Early Autumn. Henri Bergson took the Nobel, an award to a philosopher rather than a novelist or poet, and Will James won the Newbery Medal for Smoky the Cowhorse.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Early Autumn
The Pentlands are the oldest money north of Boston, a family so long established that its fortune, its house and its legend have replaced anything...
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Pinckney's Treaty
Samuel Flagg Bemis built Pinckney's Treaty around the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, the agreement that finally secured the young United States free...
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Whitman
Emory Holloway had already spent seven years recovering lost writing by Walt Whitman, publishing a two volume collection of the poet's uncollected...
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Fiddler's Farewell
Fiddler's Farewell brings together the poems Leonora Speyer had written by the mid 1920s, and its governing sensibility, evident from the title...
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Smoky the Cowhorse
Will James tells the whole story from inside a horse's own experience, opening with Smoky's wild birth on the open range and following him through...
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Creative Evolution
Creative Evolution is a philosophical argument, not a story, and its target is Darwinian evolution as popularly understood: a mechanical process of...
What Shaped 1927
Charles Lindbergh flew alone from New York to Paris in May 1927 and became the most famous man alive, and the year has kept his name ever since. The Swedish Academy went in the opposite direction and gave its prize to Bergson, whose writing on time, memory and intuition had shaped a generation of novelists including Proust. It remains one of the clearest statements the Nobel has made that literature includes the essay and the argument, not only the story.
Published in 1927, 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 selectionDeath Comes for the Archbishop
A young French bishop named Jean Marie Latour arrives in the newly acquired New Mexico Territory after the Mexican American War, tasked with...
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Curated selectionTo the Lighthouse
The Ramsay family spends a summer at their house on the Isle of Skye, where young James wants desperately to sail out to the nearby lighthouse and...