The year in prizes
1931 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Margaret Ayer Barnes won the Pulitzer for Years of Grace. Robert Frost took his second poetry prize for Collected Poems, and Elizabeth Coatsworth won the Newbery Medal for The Cat Who Went to Heaven.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Years of Grace
Jane Ward is fourteen in the Chicago of the 1890s when the novel opens, a bright, obedient daughter of the comfortable classes, in love with a boy...
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The Coming of the War, 1914
Bernadotte Schmitt's two volume The Coming of the War, 1914 reconstructs the diplomatic crisis that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz...
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Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, 1869–1909
Henry James, a Boston lawyer and the son of the philosopher William James rather than the novelist of the same name, spent years researching this...
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Collected Poems
This 1930 Collected Poems brings together Robert Frost's first five books, A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, New Hampshire and...
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The Cat Who Went to Heaven
A poor Japanese artist lives so close to the edge of hunger that when his housekeeper spends their last coins on a small calico cat instead of...
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Fridolin's Songs
This is a poetry collection built around one recurring figure, Fridolin, an invented countryman of Dalarna in central Sweden who moves as easily...
What Shaped 1931
The Depression deepened through 1931. Banks failed by the thousand, unemployment climbed past fifteen percent, and the confidence of the previous decade was gone entirely. The fiction prize went to a generational novel about a Chicago woman looking back over her choices, the kind of book that reads differently when everyone is reassessing what they built. Frost's Collected Poems arrived at the right moment for a country wanting plain speech, and his second Pulitzer confirmed a standing that would eventually bring two more.
Published in 1931, 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 selectionSanctuary
Horace Benbow, a Mississippi lawyer unhappy in his own marriage, wanders into the orbit of a bootlegger named Lee Goodwin and a menacing, impotent...
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Curated selectionThe Waves
Six childhood friends, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis, narrate their own lives in overlapping interior monologue from early...