The year in prizes
1929 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 4 notable books from our curated collection
Julia Peterkin won the Pulitzer for Scarlet Sister Mary, and Stephen Vincent Benét took the poetry prize for John Brown's Body, his book length verse account of the Civil War. Thomas Mann won the Nobel, cited above all for Buddenbrooks.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Scarlet Sister Mary
Mary is an orphan raised on an abandoned Low Country plantation by Maum Hannah, the community's midwife and moral center, and her crippled son...
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The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861–1865
Fred Albert Shannon's two volume The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861 to 1865 turns away from battles and generals entirely...
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The Training of an American
Burton Hendrick returns to Walter Hines Page six years after his first Pulitzer winning volume, this time working backward to cover the decades the...
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John Brown's Body
John Brown's Body is a book length narrative poem that carries the American Civil War from the raid on Harpers Ferry through to Appomattox, and...
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The Trumpeter of Krakow
In 1461 the Charnetski family flees their home in the borderlands after the mercenary Peter of the Button Face, acting for Ivan III of Russia,...
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Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann traces four generations of the Buddenbrook family, wealthy grain merchants in a north German port city modeled closely on his own...
What Shaped 1929
The stock market collapsed in October 1929 and the decade the prizes had been describing ended in a matter of days. Everything awarded that year was written in the confidence that came before. Benét's Civil War epic was the last kind of book a country could sit still for at such length, and it sold in the hundreds of thousands. Mann's Nobel honored a chronicle of a merchant family's slow decline over four generations, a subject about to become very immediate for readers everywhere.
Published in 1929, 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 Farewell to Arms
American Lieutenant Frederic Henry drives ambulances for the Italian army during the First World War and falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an...
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Curated selectionAll Quiet on the Western Front
Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist in the German army straight out of secondary school, still carrying the patriotic enthusiasm their teacher...
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Curated selectionLook Homeward, Angel
Eugene Gant grows up in the fictional North Carolina mountain town of Altamont, a thin disguise for Wolfe's own hometown of Asheville, in a large,...
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Curated selectionThe Sound and the Fury
Faulkner tells the collapse of the once prominent Compson family of Mississippi through four different narrators, each covering roughly the same...