The year in prizes
1928 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which asks whether five deaths on a collapsing rope bridge in Peru were accident or design. Sigrid Undset won the Nobel, and Edwin Arlington Robinson took his third poetry Pulitzer for Tristram.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey
On Friday noon, the twentieth of July 1714, the finest rope bridge in Peru breaks and drops five travelers into the gorge below. Brother Juniper, a...
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Main Currents in American Thought
Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought reads three centuries of American writing as a running argument about political and...
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The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas
Charles Edward Russell, a muckraking journalist better known for exposing corruption in Chicago's meatpacking industry and in New York's tenement...
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Tristram
Tristram is the third and final panel of a trilogy Edwin Arlington Robinson built out of Arthurian legend, following Merlin in 1917 and Lancelot in...
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Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Gay Neck, called Chitra Griva in his own language, is a homing pigeon raised in Calcutta by a boy who trains him from a young bird into a skilled,...
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Kristin Lavransdatter
As a girl in fourteenth century Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter is devoted to her father Lavrans and to the strict, loving household he runs in the...
What Shaped 1928
Wilder's short novel became a genuine bestseller and made the question at its center a popular one: whether the people killed in a random catastrophe were chosen. It is a religious book in a decade usually remembered for jazz and money, and its success suggests the decade was less sure of itself than the shorthand implies. Undset won for her medieval Norwegian trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, three volumes about a woman's whole life that took the Nobel in a period when few prizes anywhere went to work centered on a woman's interior experience.
Published in 1928, 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 selectionLady Chatterley's Lover
Constance Chatterley, married to the wealthy Sir Clifford Chatterley since before a war wound left him paralyzed from the waist down and unable to...
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Curated selectionOrlando
Orlando is born a young nobleman in the court of Elizabeth I and somehow does not age the ordinary way; Woolf carries him, and later her, across...