Fond Books

The year in prizes

1930 Book Award Winners

6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection

Oliver La Farge won the Pulitzer for Laughing Boy, a novel of two young Navajo people pulled apart by the world outside the reservation. Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Winners

In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.

What Shaped 1930

Lewis's Nobel was a national event, and his acceptance lecture used the platform to attack American letters for its complacency and its universities for teaching literature as if it had stopped in 1880. Coming four years after he had refused the Pulitzer on principle, the speech confirmed him as the most quotable critic of the culture that had just crowned him. La Farge won meanwhile for a book that treated Navajo life as a subject deserving a novel of its own, which was rare enough in 1930 to be worth noting.

Published in 1930, 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.

  • Curated selection
    As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

    When Addie Bundren dies on the family's poor Mississippi farm, her husband Anse insists on honoring her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson,...

  • Curated selection
    The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

    San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade takes on a new client calling herself Miss Wonderly, who wants a man named Thursby followed, and...

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