The year in prizes
1932 Book Award Winners
6 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Pearl S. Buck won the Pulitzer for The Good Earth, her novel of a Chinese farming family across three generations. John J. Pershing, who had commanded American forces in the First World War, took the history prize for his own account of it.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Good Earth
Wang Lung is a poor farmer in a northern Chinese village, and on the novel's first morning he walks to the great House of Hwang to collect his...
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My Experiences in the World War
My Experiences in the World War is John J. Pershing's own two volume account of commanding the American Expeditionary Forces in France, written by...
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Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography
Henry Pringle set out to write about Theodore Roosevelt without the reverence that had shaped nearly every account published since Roosevelt's 1919...
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The Flowering Stone
The Flowering Stone gathers George Dillon's reflective love lyrics and shorter meditations on time, beauty and loss into a collection built almost...
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Waterless Mountain
Younger Brother, a Navajo boy growing up on the reservation in 1920s Arizona, spends the novel's early chapters absorbing the songs, ceremonies,...
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The Forsyte Saga
Soames Forsyte, a London solicitor from a large, prosperous family of property owners, marries a beautiful, unhappy woman named Irene mostly...
What Shaped 1932
The Good Earth was the bestselling novel in America for two years running and did more than any other book to shape how Americans pictured China. Buck had grown up there as the child of missionaries, and she wrote about peasant farmers with a directness that treated them as fully realized people at a time when popular fiction rarely did. In an American year defined by drought, foreclosure and the election of Franklin Roosevelt in November, a novel about a farmer's relationship to his land found readers who understood it immediately.
Published in 1932, 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 selectionBrave New World
In a future World State that has abolished the family and human reproduction itself, embryos are grown in bottles and conditioned before birth into...
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Curated selectionJourney to the End of the Night
Ferdinand Bardamu, a poor Parisian medical student, enlists on impulse in the First World War and finds nothing in the trenches but noise, terror,...